How to Get Telegram Alerts When Any Website Changes

Gougua Hafid

4 min read

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Oct 29, 2026

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A simple way to watch job boards, price pages and news lists, and get only what’s new

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I kept opening the same web pages every day: a company careers page, a product page, a list of public tenders. Most days nothing had changed. Some days something had, and I’d find out too late.

So I built a small tool that checks those pages for me on a schedule and sends a Telegram message only when something really changes. This article shows how to set it up in about 15 minutes, without writing code.

Disclosure: I’m the developer of the tool used here, Reliable Page Change Monitor on the Apify Store.

The problem with most website monitors

Watching a page sounds simple: save it, check it again later, compare. In practice, two things make it annoying.

1. Too many false alerts. A page shows a date, a counter or a rotating banner, and you get an alert every hour for nothing. Or the site is slow for a moment, and the error is reported as a “change”.

2. Alerts that are hard to read. On a list, like job offers or news headlines, one new item pushes everything else down. A classic “diff” then shows dozens of lines removed and re-added, and the one new item you care about is buried.

What we’ll build

• A monitor that checks one or more pages every hour
• That watches only the part of the page you choose (with a CSS selector)
• That sends a Telegram message listing only the new items
• That ignores network errors and retries failed alerts instead of losing them

Here’s a real alert from my own test, watching the BBC News headlines:

New items: BBC News headlines — https://www.bbc.com/news
Checked at: 2026-10-27T06:00:24.756Z

+ Israel heads to polls for pivotal election defined by security and democracy
+ New Zealand election 2026: What you need to know

Two lines, only what’s new. Before I added “new items” mode, the same page produced 33 lines of noise.

Step 1: Create a Telegram bot (3 minutes)

1. In Telegram, open @BotFather (check for the blue verified badge).
2. Send /newbot, choose a name, then a username ending in bot.
3. BotFather replies with a token like 123456789:AAH.... Keep it private.
4. Open a chat with your new bot, press Start and send it any message, like hi.
5. In your browser, open this address with your token in place of TOKEN:
   https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/getUpdates
6. Find "chat":{"id":123456789 — that number is your chat ID.

Step 2: Open the monitor on Apify (2 minutes)

1. Create a free account on Apify. The free plan includes a small monthly usage credit.
2. Open Reliable Page Change Monitor: https://apify.com/gouguah/reliable-page-change-monitor
3. Click Try for free.

Step 3: Choose the pages to watch (5 minutes)

For each page, you give a URL, and optionally a CSS selector for the part you care about, and a compare mode:

• text — for a single value or block, like a price or a paragraph. You see what was added and removed.
• newItems — for lists, like job offers, products or headlines. You only see entries that weren’t there before, and items that just moved are ignored.

Example input:

json

{
  "pages": [
    {
      "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/newest",
      "cssSelector": ".titleline",
      "label": "HN newest stories",
      "compareMode": "newItems"
    }
  ],
  "telegramBotToken": "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN",
  "telegramChatId": "YOUR_CHAT_ID"
}

Finding a CSS selector: in Chrome, right-click the part of the page you want, choose Inspect, and look at its class or id. A class price becomes the selector .price; an id jobs becomes #jobs.

Run it once. The first run saves a baseline and sends no alert. That’s expected.

Step 4: Run it every hour (3 minutes)

1. After your first run, click Save as a new task, so your input is stored.
2. Go to Schedules, create a schedule, and add your task.
3. Pick a frequency, for example @hourly, or a cron expression.

From now on, the monitor runs on Apify’s servers. Your computer can be off.

What it costs

The tool charges $1.50 per 1,000 successful page checks, plus a tiny start fee per run. Failed checks are not charged.

• 1 page checked every hour ≈ 720 checks a month ≈ $1.08
• 10 pages every hour ≈ 7,200 checks ≈ $10.80

Checking once a day instead of every hour cuts the cost by 24.

Limits, honestly

• It reads the page’s HTML without a browser. Pages that build their content with JavaScript after loading may look empty to it.
• It doesn’t log in, and doesn’t bypass anti-bot protections or CAPTCHAs. Pages that block automated requests are reported as BLOCKED, not as changes.
• Only monitor pages you’re allowed to, and respect each site’s terms.

Ideas for what to watch

• A company careers page, to know the day a role opens
• A competitor’s pricing page
• A public tenders or grants page
• The changelog of a tool or API you depend on
• A status page or an official announcements page

If you try it on a page where it doesn’t work well, I’d really like to hear about it. That’s how the tool gets better.