I built a competitor monitor for indie founders
Hi Indie Hackers,
Competiflow is live: competiflow.com
I ship my own products. I also watch a handful of competitors while I do it. Pricing pages, changelogs, positioning tweaks. The kind of thing every founder here does in a bookmark folder, or with Visualping, or by opening the same five tabs every Monday.
That habit kept stealing time from actual building.
Visualping would ping me because a cookie banner moved. Same alert tone as a real price change. I'd open the diff, squint at pixels, and still ask myself: did their Starter tier actually move, or is this noise?
The answer I wanted was boring and specific. "Their Pro plan went from $29 to $39." With the before and after attached, so I could decide in ten seconds whether to adjust my own pricing page, update a landing headline, or ignore it and get back to code.
I couldn't find that at a price that made sense for a solo founder, so I built it.
How it works
Paste a competitor homepage. Competiflow finds their pricing, docs, blog, and changelog URLs and starts monitors. No CSS selectors to maintain.
On a schedule, we read each page, pull out the fields that matter (plan names, prices, feature bullets, post titles), and diff those. When something real changes, you get severity, a short read of what happened, a suggested next step, and the evidence: exact text before and after, source URL, capture time.
Digests by default. Email, Slack, webhook if you want them. I use it myself while juggling other projects, so the default is one summary, not twenty pings.
If you also build
REST API and MCP server (same surface I use from Cursor). OpenAPI on the site.
Pricing
One check = one page read. I priced it for indie usage, not enterprise seats.
Free trial: 100 checks, no credit card
Starter $19/mo (2,000 checks, daily cadence)
Growth $49/mo (5,000 checks, 6-hour cadence)
Pro $99/mo (10,000 checks, hourly cadence)
I'm curious how other solo founders handle this. Still on bookmarks? Visualping? Something else? And what would you watch first on a rival: pricing, changelog, or docs?
— the "a cookie banner moved" false alarm is exactly why generic page-watchers never stuck for me either.
To your question: I'd watch pricing first, changelog second. A price move forces a decision the same week; changelog is context you can batch.
I've gone down almost the same road but narrowed to one vertical — Shopify stores — where you can skip HTML entirely: every store exposes a public /products.json, so variant-level price, new-product and in/out-of-stock events come out as clean data, no CSS selectors and basically zero false positives. Structured-source-first really does seem like the only sane way to do this.
Curious how Competiflow handles rivals that A/B test their pricing — do you dedupe when they flip between two prices for different visitors? That's the case that still trips me up.
The "cookie banner moved, same alert tone as a real price change" line is exactly the failure mode that makes people stop trusting monitoring tools and go back to manual tab-checking. We do a version of this by hand right now, watching a handful of adjacent products for positioning and pricing shifts as part of our own research, and it's genuinely tedious enough that a screenshot-diff tool alone doesn't cut it, you still have to read every diff yourself to tell signal from noise. The severity + suggested-next-step framing you described is the actual product, the monitoring part is commodity. To answer your question directly: pricing first, always, then changelog, docs last, since docs changes are usually lagging indicators of something that already happened on the pricing/positioning side weeks earlier.
The pixel diff versus semantic diff distinction is the whole game here, and it's the same problem I fight with in code review tooling. A raw diff of a docs page is as noisy as a cookie banner alert, what you actually want is "this plan added a seat limit" the way you'd want "this function's return type changed" instead of "14 lines changed". Curious how you handle pages that A/B test pricing though, because if a competitor serves different prices to different visitors your monitor could report a change that never actually happened for a given customer. That edge case is the kind of thing that would make me trust the tool a lot more once I saw you'd thought about it.
Bookmark folder and a Monday habit, honestly. I compete against two products with a near-identical pricing ladder to mine, and the thing I actually check is exactly your example — whether their entry tier quietly gained the feature I differentiate on. A $0 change to their feature grid matters more to me than a $10 price change. To answer your question: pricing first, but homepage positioning copy is the earlier tell — the headline usually changes a few weeks before the pricing page does.
This fills a real gap — most competitor tracking tools are built for big companies with big budgets. How do you decide what counts as a "meaningful" change worth alerting on, versus noise?
The shift from "something changed" to "here's what actually changed" feels like the real product.
Reducing false positives is often more valuable than adding more monitoring.
The false-positive fight is almost the whole product in any diff-alerting system.
The failure mode that bit me in production was the opposite one: A monitor that goes quiet looks identical to a monitor with nothing to report. Alarming on the age of the newest observed change made silence distinguishable from breakage for me.
Thanks for your feedback!