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Building a Competitor Monitoring Tool in 30 Lines of Node.js

Building a Competitor Monitoring Tool in 30 Lines of Node.js

via Dev.toBoehner

I wanted to know when my main competitor changed their pricing page. Not in a shady way — I just wanted to stop finding out weeks after the fact when someone mentioned it in a Slack thread. The naive solution is bookmarking and checking manually. I did this for about two weeks before admitting it wasn't going to stick. What I actually wanted was to set it once and get notified when something changed. Here's the script I wrote. It's about 30 lines. The approach SnapAPI's /v1/analyze endpoint returns structured data about any URL: the page type, the primary CTA, detected technologies, and more — from a real Chromium browser session. So instead of scraping HTML and parsing it, I can just ask "what's the CTA on this page right now?" and diff that against yesterday's answer. No parsing. No XPath selectors that break when the site redesigns. Just a clean JSON field. The script // competitor-monitor.js // Polls a URL daily, alerts when the primary CTA or tech stack changes. // Requirements: N

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