Turns out most founders don’t track competitor pricing until it’s too late
Hey everyone 👋
A couple weeks ago I shared that I was building a small tool to stop manually checking competitor pricing pages.
Since then I’ve been talking to founders on Reddit, X, and here to understand how people actually track competitors.
A few interesting patterns started showing up:
• Most founders don’t track competitor pricing continuously
• They usually check only when changing their own pricing or positioning
• Some founders told me they’ve missed competitor pricing changes for weeks
One founder even mentioned losing several deals because a competitor quietly dropped their pricing and they didn’t realize until much later.
Which made me rethink something about the product.
Maybe the real value isn’t constant monitoring.
Maybe it’s more like:
“Don’t let a competitor change pricing without me knowing.”
So now I’m experimenting with a very simple workflow:
Paste a competitor pricing page → get notified if something meaningful changes.
No dashboards, just alerts.
Still very early, but I’m curious:
How do you personally keep track of competitor pricing or plan changes?
Do you:
• check manually once in a while
• use some kind of monitoring
• or mostly ignore competitors?
Would love to hear how others handle this.
Your pattern matches what I've seen too. Most founders check competitor pricing reactively - when they're about to change their own pricing, or when they lose a deal and wonder why.
The problem with continuous monitoring is that price alone is usually a lagging signal. By the time a competitor has quietly dropped their price and you've noticed and responded, you've already lost some deals. The real question is whether your pricing is causing you to lose deals you should be winning, which is hard to know from just watching a pricing page.
That said, the "notify me when something changes" use case feels genuinely useful. It's the same reason people set up Google Alerts - not because they're obsessively tracking, but because they don't want to miss something material without at least knowing it happened.
One thing worth testing: whether the signal that actually matters to founders is a price change, or a positioning change. Competitors often adjust how they describe value (feature bundles, what's in which tier) without changing the number. Sometimes that's more important than the price itself.
Good problem to work on - the boring manual checking is exactly the kind of thing worth automating.
Honest answer to your question, we mostly ignore competitors 😄
Running app development agency for 7 years and I check competitor pricing maybe twice a year. Usually when we are thinking about changing our own rates.
But your observation about the silent price drop is very real. In services business we see this more with Upwork agencies. Someone quietly lowers their hourly rate and starts winning projects you were winning before. You only notice when win rate drops.
The alert approach makes more sense than dashboard honestly. Nobody wants one more thing to check daily. But a notification that says "this competitor just changed their pricing page" is something you would actually act on.
Simple and useful. Good direction.
One question, are you planning this for SaaS only or service businesses also?