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Why we built Competitor Tracker

We built Competitor Tracker because we needed it ourselves.

At Vacation Tracker, we kept doing the same annoying thing: checking competitor websites manually. Pricing pages, product pages, positioning, new features, integrations, campaigns. Sometimes nothing changed. Sometimes something important changed and we noticed late. Either way, it was not a great use of time.

The existing competitive intelligence tools we looked at felt too complex and too expensive for what we wanted. We did not need a big enterprise workflow or another tool everyone had to remember to log into. We wanted something much simpler:

watch the competitors, ignore the noise, and send us one useful digest every Monday.

That became Competitor Tracker.

The idea is simple. Add the competitors you care about. We track their public websites every week. When something meaningful changes, pricing, product, messaging, docs, integrations, security, campaigns, corporate signals, it goes into a Monday dossier. If you just want the summary, read the email and move on. If something looks important, drill down into the source, the snapshot and the history behind it.

We also decided to have some fun with the branding. The product is a small AI agency: CT Lucky, an AI investigator dog, writes the dossiers, and a pack of agents does the watching in the background. It sounds a little ridiculous, which is part of the point. Competitive intelligence tools are usually very serious, very expensive and very boring. We wanted this to feel useful first, but also memorable.

This is us scratching our own itch again, like we did with Vacation Tracker. We had a boring recurring problem, we wanted a simpler way to solve it, so we built the thing we wished already existed.

If you run a SaaS company and still check competitors by hand, I would love to hear how you do it today. Spreadsheet? Slack reminders? Random browser tabs once a month? Or, like us, mostly guilt and good intentions?

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Competitor Tracker
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    I'm curious what surprised you most once you stopped watching competitors manually. Was there anything about what actually turned out to matter that challenged your original assumptions about competitive monitoring?