Is changedetection io free? Yes, with one catch
The open source app costs nothing if you host it. Someone else hosting it costs $8.99 a month, about the same as AyeWatch's starting price.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom · Editorial team
· 3 min read
Is changedetection io free? The software is. changedetection.io is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can download and run it without paying anything. The catch is that "free" means you run it yourself. If you want someone else to run it, there is a paid plan, and there are hosted alternatives at about the same price.
What you get for free
The free version is the full open source app. It is not a cut-down trial. Run it on your own computer or server and you get:
- as many watched pages as your machine can handle
- element targeting with CSS, XPath, JSONPath or jq
- Browser Steps to log in or click through a page before checking it
- restock and price-drop alerts for shopping pages
- change tracking for PDF files and JSON APIs
- notifications to email, Slack, Discord, Telegram and more than 80 other services
That is a generous package. Around 35,000 people have starred the project on GitHub.
The catch: you are the host
To use it free you install it with Docker or Python and keep that machine running, because it only checks pages while it is on. Someone has to apply updates, back up the data and fix watches when a site changes its layout and a selector stops matching. For a developer that is a small job. For everyone else it is the reason to look elsewhere.
The paid plan
The makers sell a hosted version for $8.99 a month. You get a login by email, up to 5,000 URL watches, checks from about every five minutes, a real Chrome browser for pages built with JavaScript, and proxies in Europe and the US. Paying yearly gets you two months free. You can cancel anytime.
A hosted option that thinks about the changes
If you are paying around $9 anyway, it is worth comparing with AyeWatch, which works differently.
changedetection.io tells you that text on a page changed. AyeWatch asks whether the change matches what you said you care about. You write a sentence like "tell me if this ticket page adds new dates", and it only alerts when a change fits that sentence. Each alert arrives as a short summary, by push on your phone, or on paid plans by email, Slack, Discord or webhook.
| changedetection.io | AyeWatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free version | Full app, self-hosted | Free Preview, three runs, no card |
| Lowest paid plan | $8.99 a month, hosted | From $9 a month |
| Setup | Docker or Python, or the hosted plan | Sign up on web, iOS or Android |
| Change detection | Text, selectors, filters, optional AI with your own model | Plain-English rule judged by AI |
| Topic monitoring | No | Topics across the web and social media |
AyeWatch's free option is a trial rather than a free plan: three runs that do not renew. It is there to show you the alerts before you pay.
A quick way to decide
Ask yourself two questions. Do you already run a home server or a cloud machine that stays on? And do the pages you want to watch need a login? If the answer to either is yes, the free self-hosted changedetection.io makes sense. If both answers are no, paying around $9 a month for a hosted tool is the simpler route, and the choice is between a hosted diff tool and one that reads the change for you.
Which should you choose?
Pick changedetection.io if you want zero cost and do not mind hosting, or if you need to log in to the pages you watch. Pick AyeWatch if you would rather not run anything and want fewer, clearer alerts. For most people who asked "is it free" because they hoped to avoid setup, AyeWatch is the better pick. Its comparison with changedetection.io shows the differences in one place.