Point a change monitor at the pricing table, check the prices are in the HTML, and use the Wayback Machine to see competitor price changes from before you started.
To monitor a competitor's pricing page, point a website change monitor at the pricing table rather than the whole page, and have it alert you when the text in that table changes. Before you trust it, open View Source and check the prices are actually in the HTML. On plenty of pricing pages they aren't. Canva's UK pricing page showed Pro at £100 a year in a browser on 23 September 2026, while the HTML its server sent that day had no pound prices in it at all. For what they charged before you started watching, the Wayback Machine keeps old copies and can show two of them side by side.
The price is the obvious one, but the quieter moves happen around it: a limit on the free plan gets tighter, a feature moves up a tier, the annual discount grows, a plan disappears into "contact sales". All of that sits in the plan cards and the comparison table below them.
| Part of the page | What a change there tends to mean | Worth an alert? |
|---|---|---|
| Plan prices | A price rise or cut, or a new currency | Yes |
| Plan limits (seats, projects, usage) | A plan made more or less generous without touching the price | Yes |
| Feature comparison table | A feature moved between tiers, added or removed | Yes |
| Monthly and yearly toggle | A change to the annual discount | Yes, but see the toggle section |
| Plan names and the recommended badge | Repackaging, or a push towards a different tier | Usually |
| Logos, testimonials, banners | Marketing refresh | No |
Because it answers a different question. Google's help page for Alerts says you get emails "when new results for a topic show up in Google Search". A pricing page that already ranks isn't a new result when someone edits a number on it. So Alerts is good for news about a competitor and poor at catching a quiet edit to a page Google already knows. That last part is our reading of how Alerts works rather than something Google states, but it's why the tools built for this job read the page itself.
There are three usual reasons.
The prices are added by JavaScript. Your browser downloads the HTML and then runs scripts that fill the page in. A monitor that only reads the HTML never sees the second part. We fetched a handful of UK pricing pages on 23 September 2026 to check. Slack's and Dropbox's sent their pound prices in the HTML. Canva's and Mailchimp's UK pages mentioned GBP in their code but carried no pound prices, even though Canva's pricing page showed £100 and £180 a year once the page had loaded. A monitor pointed at Canva's page would watch an empty space and never fire. Why a website monitor misses changes on a JavaScript page covers the fix, which is usually to watch the data URL the page loads its prices from.
The page has a toggle. Many pricing pages have a monthly and yearly switch, and only one side is showing when the page loads. Canva's defaulted to yearly on our visit, with a "Save from 16%" label on the switch. A change to the monthly price might not appear in the default view at all. If the toggle loads its prices from a data URL, watch that, because it usually carries both.
The price depends on where you are. Many software companies show a different currency, or a different price, depending on the visitor's country. Slack keeps a separate UK address for its pricing, under /intl/en-gb/, and that's the one we read. If your monitor runs from a server in another country, it may be watching the dollar page while your customers see the pound one. Point it at the UK address where there is one, and check the first result it captures shows the currency you expect.
Open the pricing page and View Source
Search the source for a price you can see on screen. If it's there, you can watch the page. If it isn't, find the data URL in your browser's Network panel and watch that instead.
Use the UK address if there is one
Look for a /uk/ or /en-gb/ version of the pricing page, so you watch the prices UK customers are shown.
Narrow it to the pricing table
Pick the plan cards and the comparison table and leave out everything else. This is what keeps the alerts down to changes that matter.
Check the first capture
Read what the monitor saved on its first run. The prices, the currency and the plan names should all be there.
Send the alerts somewhere the team reads
A shared Discord or Slack channel works better than one person's inbox, because pricing changes usually need more than one person to react.
On StockWatch, a Visual Selector monitor is built for step three: you open the page, click the part you want, and get an alert when that part's text changes. If you'd rather hear only when a particular word turns up, like "Enterprise" appearing in a plan you're watching, monitoring a website for a specific word explains how. Alerts can go to a Discord channel through a webhook.
How often should it check? Pricing pages don't change often, so every few minutes is plenty for most teams. It only matters if you want to react on the day, for example to a launch-week discount.
A monitor only knows about changes from the day you set it up. For competitor price changes from before that, use the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive's guide to comparing snapshots gives the address to use: web.archive.org/web/changes/ followed by the page's URL. Pick two captures and it shows them side by side with the changes highlighted in blue and yellow.
It has limits worth knowing. The Wayback Machine's help page says there's a 3 to 10 hour lag between a crawl and the copy appearing. Save Page Now keeps one copy of one page, once, and doesn't add it to future crawls. A site's robots.txt can stop it being archived at all. And the same JavaScript problem applies, because an archived copy of a page whose prices load by script may show an empty table. For more ways to date a page, see how to check when a website was last updated.
Their careers page, because a run of new jobs in one area tells you where they're heading before any product page does. Getting job alerts from a careers page covers how. Their changelog or release notes, if they publish one. And if they sell physical products, price drop alerts on their shop tell you when they discount.
Point a website change monitor at the pricing table on their page and have it alert you when that section's text changes. First check the prices are in the page's HTML by searching View Source for a price you can see. If they aren't, the prices are loaded by JavaScript and you need to watch the data URL they come from.
They can see the requests in their server logs, as they can for any visitor. Our guide on whether a website knows you are monitoring it goes through what they can and can't tell.
Not reliably. Google says Alerts emails you when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. An edit to a pricing page Google has already indexed is not a new result, so a quiet price change is easy for it to miss.
Use the Wayback Machine. Go to web.archive.org/web/changes/ followed by the pricing page's address, pick two captures, and it shows them side by side with the differences highlighted. It only has the dates it happened to crawl, and pages whose prices load by JavaScript may be archived without them.
The most common reason is that the prices are added by JavaScript after the page loads, so the monitor is watching HTML with no prices in it. The next is the monthly and yearly toggle, where the monitor only sees the default side. The third is location, where the monitor sees a different currency to you.
Whether a competitor can tell they're being watched is covered in does a website know you are monitoring it.
Watch a pricing page for changes Five monitors free, checked as often as every 60 seconds.