I wanted to know when three competitors changed their pricing page, published something, or shipped a feature. The tools that do this start at a few hundred a month and do forty things I do not need.

So I built the narrow version myself in an afternoon, with no engineering background.

What it does

Checks a list of URLs on a schedule, notices meaningful text changes, ignores cosmetic ones, and emails me a short digest on Monday with what moved and a plain English description of the change.

That is it. It does nothing else, which is why it works.

What it cost

An afternoon, and roughly the price of a coffee a month in API calls. The honest comparison is not against the paid tools, it is against the zero I was spending before, which produced zero.

Where it falls over

Sites that render everything in JavaScript. Anything behind a login. And it occasionally flags a date change as meaningful, which is mildly annoying and not worth fixing.

It also has no interface. It is a scheduled job and an email, which is all I wanted.

Why this matters more than the tracker

The point is not the tool. The point is that the gap between "I wish something did this" and "something does this" is now an afternoon for a marketer with no code.

Most teams have four or five of those wishes sitting unspoken. Write them down this week.

# Build brief

I want a script that:
- reads a list of URLs from a file
- fetches each one on a schedule
- compares the main text to last time
- ignores changes under 40 characters
- ignores dates, cookie banners, nav
- emails me a digest of what changed,
  described in plain English

I am not a developer. Explain each step
and tell me what to install.

Ask me questions before you start.

That last line is the important one. Asking it to interrogate the brief first is the difference between a working tool and three hours of debugging something you did not specify properly.