Free FollowThatPage alternatives, side by side
Five free ways to watch a page, what each free plan includes, and where the free part ends.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom · Editorial team
· 3 min read
Follow That Page is free, so anyone looking for a free FollowThatPage alternative wants something specific: free, but better at one thing. Maybe alerts on the phone, fewer pointless emails, or pages that use JavaScript. Here are five options, what each free tier really includes, and where it stops being free.
First, what free Follow That Page gives you
A free account gets 20 daily checks and one hourly check. If you add more pages, they queue and get checked less often. Changes arrive by email as added and removed lines. It does not run JavaScript, cannot follow pages behind a password, and free users may get a few advertising emails a year, mostly for charity. A paid Pro account raises the check limits.
The five free options
| Tool | What is free | Where free ends |
|---|---|---|
| Distill | 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud | Cloud checks every 6 hours at best; paid from $15/mo |
| Visualping | 5 pages, 150 checks a month | Paid from $14/mo |
| changedetection.io | Everything, if you host it | Hosted is $8.99/mo |
| Page Monitor | A Chrome extension | Browser must stay open |
| AyeWatch | Free Preview: 3 runs, up to 3 topics | Pro from $9/mo |
Distill: the biggest free plan
Distill's free plan is the most generous on the list for page count. You pick an element on the page and set a condition. Local monitors run in your browser or desktop app and are free, but stop when your device is off. Only five monitors run in Distill's cloud on the free plan, and those check every six hours at most.
Good for: watching a few exact numbers while your computer is on.
Visualping: free screenshots and summaries
The free plan watches 5 pages and allows 150 checks a month, roughly one check a day per page. It compares pages visually, by text or by element, and adds AI summaries.
Good for: seeing what a page looked like before and after.
changedetection.io: free if you run it
Open source and free to self-host on your own computer or server. It can target parts of a page with CSS or XPath, log in with browser steps, and notify you through 85 or more channels. You handle installing and updating it.
Good for: people who already run a home server.
Page Monitor: free and private
A Chrome extension. Pick an element, choose how often to check, get a browser notification. Data stays on your device. There is no email or chat alert, and nothing happens when Chrome is closed.
Good for: a quick private watch on one or two pages.
AyeWatch: a free trial of a different idea
AyeWatch works differently from the rest. You paste a page and describe the change you want in a sentence, such as "tell me when the swimming pool timetable for next month is posted". It alerts you only for that, with a short summary, and sends push notifications to its iOS and Android apps.
Its free part is a Free Preview, not a free plan: three monitoring runs across up to three topics, at daily or slower intervals, with no card. The runs do not renew. After that, Pro is $9 a month with hourly checks and adds email, Slack, Discord and webhooks. Usage is measured in monitoring credits.
Good for: trying alerts that skip the noise before deciding whether to pay.
Which free option should you pick?
- Want the most free monitors: Distill.
- Want before-and-after pictures: Visualping.
- Have a server: changedetection.io.
- Want nothing to sign up for: Page Monitor.
- Want alerts that only fire for the change you care about: try AyeWatch's Free Preview.
Or just keep Follow That Page
If you watch one or two plain pages and email works for you, Follow That Page is free with no time limit, and that is hard to beat. The others make sense when its emails get too noisy or too slow. If that is you, start an AyeWatch Free Preview on the page that bothers you most.