A free pagecrawl alternative, in five minutes

Want a free pagecrawl alternative you can try before lunch? Here is the quick version: four free options, what each one gives you, and a five-minute setup for the one we recommend.

First, a fair point about PageCrawl

PageCrawl.io already has a free plan. It covers six pages and 220 checks a month, checked hourly at most, with Slack, email and webhooks included. If that is enough, you may not need to move at all. People usually look elsewhere because the alerts are noisy, or because what they want to follow is not a single web page.

Four free options

AyeWatch. A Free Preview with three lifetime monitoring runs across up to three topics, daily or slower, no card. It is a test drive rather than a forever plan, but it shows you the main idea: you write what matters in a sentence and only hear about matching changes. Works on web, iOS and Android.

changedetection.io. Free if you run it yourself with Docker or pip. Open source, lots of filters, and you look after the server.

Distill. 25 free monitors, five of them in the cloud on a six-hour schedule. The rest run in your browser or desktop app, so they pause when your computer sleeps.

Visualping. Five pages and 150 checks a month, hourly at best, with screenshot comparisons.

Why we pick AyeWatch

Most free trackers compare page versions and tell you something changed. Then you work out whether it matters. AyeWatch flips that. You describe the change in plain words, and its AI only pings you when it sees one that fits. Cookie banners, rotating ads and date stamps do not count unless you say they do.

It also follows more than pages: news and forum chatter about a topic, a subreddit, a YouTube channel, an X account or a LinkedIn company page.

Five minutes, start to finish

Minute 1. Sign up on the web or in the iOS or Android app. No card.

Minute 2. Choose "Paste a link" and add the page you used to watch in PageCrawl. You can add more than one URL to the same monitor.

Minute 3. Write the rule. Keep it specific:

Tell me when the concert dates or ticket prices change. Ignore merch and news posts.

Minute 4. Pick a daily schedule. That is the fastest the preview allows, and it makes the three runs last.

Minute 5. Turn on push notifications. On the free preview, alerts arrive by push and in your feed.

Then wait for the first summary and see whether it is the kind of alert you wanted.

Three tips for a better rule

• Say what to ignore. Every page has parts that move on their own: carousels, review counts, "last updated" lines. Naming them in the rule keeps them out of your alerts.
• Use numbers when you have them. "Below $20" is clearer than "cheaper".
• One question per monitor. If you care about prices and about new job posts on the same site, make two monitors. Each alert then answers one thing, and you can give each its own schedule later on a paid plan.

What it costs after the preview

The three runs do not renew. Pro is $9 a month and adds email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the API. Pro+ at $19 adds ASAP checks. Checks are counted in credits, usually one each, so a slower schedule goes further.

When PageCrawl's free plan wins

If you need a handful of pages checked for free, month after month, PageCrawl's own free plan does more than AyeWatch's preview. Its 220 monthly checks cover six pages once a day. Keep it for that.

If you want to see whether a smarter alert saves you time, spend the three runs on AyeWatch. The PageCrawl alternatives roundup has a longer list if you want more options.