WatchTower – Website Change & Price Monitor 🔔

Monitor any website for changes — automatically. WatchTower watches a list of URLs and tells you the moment a price, stock status, headline, policy, or any on-page value changes. It tracks specific fields (not noisy full-page HTML), so you only get alerts that matter — and it sends them straight to your webhook, Slack, Zapier, or Make.

Perfect for competitor price monitoring, stock/availability tracking, content change detection, and compliance monitoring.

✨ Features

• Field-level monitoring — target one element with a CSS selector (e.g. .price) or watch the whole page.
• Smart triggers — alert on any change, only on a price increase, a price decrease, or when a keyword appears (e.g. "in stock").
• Numeric awareness — parse prices/quantities and report the exact delta (e.g. -$30.00).
• Change history — every run stores a baseline, then reports only what's new.
• Webhook alerts — POST every change to Slack, Zapier, Make, or your own API.
• Runs on a schedule — set it to run hourly/daily and it becomes a hands-off monitor.
• No proxy required for most sites — cheap to run.

🎯 Use cases

• E-commerce sellers — track competitor prices and get alerted on drops before you lose the sale.
• Deal & coupon sites — detect price drops and back-in-stock events automatically.
• Brands & MAP compliance — watch reseller pages for policy-breaking prices.
• Procurement / revenue teams — monitor supplier and competitor pricing.
• SEO & marketing — get notified when a competitor changes a title, CTA, or landing-page copy.
• Compliance & legal — track changes to terms, policies, or regulatory pages.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
watches	array	One entry per thing to monitor (see below). Required.
onlyReportChanges	boolean	Only output rows where something changed. Default true.
webhookUrl	string	Optional. Receives a JSON POST for every change.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional. Off by default.

Each watch entry:

{
  "url": "https://shop.com/product/123",
  "selector": ".price-now",
  "label": "Competitor price",
  "extract": "number",
  "notifyOn": "decrease",
  "keyword": "in stock"
}

• url (required) — page to check.
• selector — CSS selector for one element. Omit to watch the whole page text.
• label — friendly name shown in output/alerts.
• extract — text (default), number (parses a price/quantity), or html.
• notifyOn — change (default), increase, decrease, or contains.
• keyword — required when notifyOn is contains.

📤 Output

{
  "watchId": "a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8",
  "label": "Competitor price",
  "url": "https://shop.com/product/123",
  "selector": ".price-now",
  "extract": "number",
  "previousValue": 129.0,
  "currentValue": 99.0,
  "changed": true,
  "changeType": "decrease",
  "numericDelta": -30.0,
  "isFirstRun": false,
  "checkedAt": "2026-07-14T09:00:00.000Z"
}

🔌 Integrations & scheduling

• Schedule it in Apify (hourly/daily) so monitoring runs automatically.
• Set webhookUrl to a Slack incoming webhook, a Zapier/Make catch-hook, or your own endpoint to get instant alerts.
• Export results to CSV, Excel, JSON, or Google Sheets from the dataset, or pull them via the Apify API.

❓ FAQ

Does it work on JavaScript-heavy pages? v1 fetches static HTML, which covers most price/stock/content pages. JavaScript rendering is on the roadmap.

Do I need a proxy? No — most public pages work without one. A proxy is optional for sites that block plain requests.

How is it priced? Pay per result — you're charged per URL checked. No subscription. Run it as often as you like and only pay for the checks you use.

Can it monitor multiple pages at once? Yes — add as many watches entries as you need in a single run.

🗺️ Roadmap

• JavaScript rendering for dynamic / SPA pages
• Visual / screenshot diffing
• Multiple fields per URL
• AI "summarize what changed"
• Built-in email digests