monity.ai

Hey Indie Hackers 👋

I recently launched monity.ai—an AI-powered website change monitoring tool that acts like a personal agent for the web.

It started from a simple pain point: I was traveling a lot and constantly checking for flight deals. Most tools I tried were either paid, limited, or flaky. So I wrote my own automation scripts with Node.js and Puppeteer to monitor pages and ping me when something changed. Then came online shopping, job listings, and even obscure web forms. I was hooked.

Now I’ve turned it into a product—with an AI twist.

Here's what monity.ai does:

• 🧠 Use natural language prompts to define what you're watching for—like "notify me if the price drops below $300" or "alert me when this element changes"

• ⚡ Get notified by email when your custom conditions are met—no need to constantly refresh or monitor the page yourself

• 🤖 Use AI actions to go one step further—write a prompt to automatically fill and submit a form before each check, perfect for logging in, setting filters, or navigating

• 🧩 Don’t like prompts? Use the simple but powerful UI to define actions and extract data visually—no coding required

• 🔁 Choose how often monity checks the page, and it handles everything in the background

Think of it as an AI agent for the web—watching, analyzing, acting.

It’s generic on purpose, because I wanted something flexible enough to handle everything from:

• tracking prices

• spotting job post updates

• monitoring competitors

• scraping content you care about

Would love to hear what kind of use cases you’d throw at it. Also open to feedback, suggestions, or just curious minds!

Try it here: https://monity.ai

Free for basic usage, no credit card required.

Thanks 🙌

Launching my own startup was always my dream. I've got quite a lot of experience as a developer - I've spent the last 7 years working in an agency, building many websites, mobile apps, and even a few games. A few things surprised me both positively and negatively, and maybe my thoughts will help you avoid some mistakes.

What did I build, and why?

Monity.ai is a simple concept: you type a URL and define what and how often you want to monitor. When something changes, you get an email, so you can act quickly without refreshing the same page repeatedly. Nothing groundbreaking—a generic tool useful for many situations. The idea came to me a while ago when I was traveling often and hunting for cheap flights. I tried a few available tools, but they were usually paid and didn't always work well. So I started writing my own automation scripts using Node.js and Puppeteer. The same thing happened with online shopping. Looking back, I probably even bought things when prices dropped slightly, happy that my automation script worked :) Eventually, I thought, "Why not turn this into a real app?" That's how it started, and it took me well over a year to launch. I registered my company on December 31st, rushing to end a great year on a high note. It felt great at the time, but then I spent another 2.5 months improving things before making the domain public. It wasn't the ideal start. Like probably many of you, I made the mistake of waiting too long, thinking the product wasn't good enough yet.

The product is ready—what next?

I have to admit, getting my first users was harder than I thought. I wouldn't say marketing is harder than development, but it's still tough, especially for someone like me. Initially, I shared monity with friends and communities, and yes, even spammed a bit on Discord and developer-related channels. Feedback was generally positive, but I didn't get many returning users. However, I kind of expected that developers wouldn't be my main audience since they usually can build something similar for themselves.

Looking back, if you're at this stage, do your marketing earlier. Create a waitlist and connect with people before your release. This also helps validate your idea and get your first customers quicker. It would have been better to launch a few months earlier and then improve or fix issues once the product was live. User feedback was extremely valuable—there were a few UI areas where I needed to make changes because users got confused and kept making the same mistakes. When you work on something for so long, everything seems obvious and user-friendly, but trust me, it often isn't.

Reddit and X

I think this is one of the strategies for new founders. To be honest, that's why I started my journey on these platforms. However, it's been tougher than I expected. Promoting your startup on Reddit is difficult since most subreddits strictly forbid it. And I don't know about your experiences, but it feels like everyone on X is promoting their startup—or maybe the algorithm just keeps showing me those posts. Either way, competition feels huge.

Facebook or LinkedIn ads

Ads helped speed up user acquisition a bit, but honestly, I expected a better ratio of free to paid users. I probably made mistakes in targeting, so if you can, plan your campaigns more carefully. I will try to plan it better next time.

Cold outreach: personalized emails and LinkedIn messages

This is time-consuming, but right now, I think it's the best way to market and attract users. Finding the right people, analyzing your competitors and their customers, and simply being honest seems to work best. Offering something personalized helps—in my case, I even set up monitoring tasks for potential clients so they could test my tool without registering (though monity has a free plan with limited monthly credits).

SEO

SEO is a longer-term strategy, and there's not much organic traffic compared to content-driven sites (maybe I'm still stuck in the famous Google sandbox). However, SEO will be one of my main focuses in the coming months, and I hope Monity ranks well by year-end.

What’s next?

Finally, I plan to invest more in paid ads but need to carefully plan them to avoid mistakes and get maximum value. Now I have people helping me, making it easier to focus more on development. The goal is to rely more on AI prompts, improve the reliability of AI agents (yeah, they aren't perfect yet, and I often still rely on manual UI tasks), and build the best AI web browser automation tool possible.

So, what are your thoughts? Have you had similar experiences, or maybe you have helpful tips for me or others in the community? Or maybe you're using monity.ai or similar tools? I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts.