Distill alternative
Distill's plans and prices, checked in October 2026, next to the plans here. Distill leads with a browser extension, so where the check runs matters as much as how often it runs.
Plans and prices
Distill Free: 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud, 1,000 cloud checks a month, checked every 6 hours in the cloud, 30 email alerts.
Distill Starter: 15 dollars a month for 50 monitors, 30,000 cloud checks a month, checked every 10 minutes.
Distill Professional: 35 dollars a month for 150 monitors, 100,000 cloud checks a month, checked every 5 minutes.
For comparison, the plans here, read from the same table the server enforces:
Free, no card: 3 monitors, every 60 minutes at the fastest, 30 days of change history.
Pro, 9 dollars a month: 25 monitors, every 15 minutes at the fastest, 180 days of change history, browser rendering on up to 5 monitors, REST API access.
Business, 19 dollars a month: 100 monitors, every 10 minutes at the fastest, 365 days of change history, browser rendering on up to 20 monitors, REST API access.
Figures are in US dollars, billed monthly.
Prices checked October 2026 on each vendor's pricing page.
What Distill does that this tool does not
Distill ships a browser extension, and a monitor can be checked locally, in seconds, while the browser is open. That is a shorter gap between the change and the alert than any check run on a server can offer.
Its extension sees the page as the browser renders it, so content that only appears after JavaScript has run is visible to it. It also sends SMS alerts on its paid plans.
Its cloud interval goes to 5 minutes on the Professional plan, faster than the 10 minutes that is the fastest any plan here accepts.
What this tool does differently
The comparison is text, not pixels. Clock times, dates, relative times such as 3 minutes ago, session ids and the usual cookie banner lines are stripped before two versions are compared, so an alert means the words moved.
The free plan here checks every 60 minutes, on 3 monitors. The Distill free tier checks the cloud every 6 hours, so the free plan here reads the same page more often without a payment.
No plan here counts checks. A monitor runs at its own interval all month, and the price is the same whether the page changes every hour or never.
A page that needs JavaScript can use the render tier here, which runs every 30 minutes at the fastest, on up to 5 monitors on Pro and 20 on Business.
Try a page before you sign up
The preview tool on the home page (/) needs no account. Paste a public page address, add a selector if you want one, and read the exact text that would be watched. Up to 20 previews a day are allowed from one address.
The pricing page (/pricing) lists the plans, the interval each one allows and what each one costs. It reads the same plan configuration the server enforces, so the numbers match.
Distill alternative questions
Does this replace Distill?
It depends on what you need. A browser extension that checks a page in seconds while the browser is open, and SMS alerts on paid plans, are things Distill offers and this tool does not. A text diff with the noise taken out, a free plan that checks hourly and no counting of checks are what this tool is built for.
How current are the Distill prices on this page?
They were read from Distill's own pricing page in October 2026. The plan figures for this tool are read from the same table the server enforces, so they cannot drift from what is sold.
Where does the check run here?
On the server, at the monitor's own interval. A page that builds its content in the browser can use the render tier, which runs every 30 minutes at the fastest. There is no browser extension and nothing runs on your machine.