How to Build a Competitor Pricing Tracker That Emails You When Prices Change

You find out a competitor dropped their free plan — from a churned customer. "We switched because your pricing doesn't match what we need now," they wrote. You go to the competitor's pricing page. Sure enough: three weeks ago they added a higher seat limit on the mid-tier plan and quietly dropped the free plan entirely. Your AE had no idea. Your CSM had no idea. Nobody had a Google Alert for it. This happens constantly. Competitors change pricing structures — mid-cycle, mid-quarter, mid-sales-conversation — and most teams only notice when it hurts them. A weekly automated scraper would have flagged it within days of the change. Here's how to build one. Why Pricing Pages Are Unusually Hard to Monitor The naive approach — download the page, hash it, compare to last week — fails immediately in practice. Dynamic rendering. Most SaaS pricing pages render via JavaScript. A simple curl returns a skeleton with no pricing data. You need a browser-based scraper that executes JavaScript before re