Website watcher
One public page, checked on a fixed interval, with an email only when the readable text really changes.
One page, checked on a schedule
A watcher is one public page address and one interval. It reads the page, strips the noise, and compares the result with the last version it stored.
It is a watcher and not a crawler: it fetches the page you gave it and nothing else. Pages are spread with jitter inside the interval, so a set of watchers added in one sitting does not fire all at once.
Fewer false alerts
Most page alerts are not changes. Before the comparison the text is normalized: clock times, dates, relative times such as 3 minutes ago, long random values that are really a session id, and the usual cookie banner lines are removed. Runs of whitespace are collapsed and empty lines are dropped.
A page that cannot be reached is not a change, and a page behind a bot wall is reported as blocked, not as changed. A robots.txt group that names PageChangeDetectorBot is obeyed, and a site owner who would rather not be watched can write to [email protected] to be added to the blocklist.
Intervals and plans
Each plan sets the fastest interval it will accept. Free checks every 60 minutes at the fastest, 15 minutes on Pro and 10 minutes on Business. 3 monitors on Free, 25 on Pro, 100 on Business.
Every plan keeps a change history: 30 days of history on Free, 180 days on Pro and 365 days on Business. Checks are never counted, so no plan needs a monthly allowance of readings.
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.
Website watcher questions
Can a site owner stop the watcher?
Yes, on two levels. A robots.txt group that names PageChangeDetectorBot is obeyed, and a host that would rather not be watched at all can ask to be added to the blocklist by writing to [email protected]. The watcher never sends cookies, never signs in and never claims to be a browser, so a page it is asked to read is read once per interval and nothing else is requested.