A companion reads each pricing page, tells a promo banner from a repricing, and appends a dated row per competitor to a sheet you keep forever.
The job is small and relentless: map their catalog to yours, visit each page on a schedule, record list price, promo price and packaging, then log the deltas somewhere with history.
Everyone does the first pass. Almost nobody is still doing it in week nine, which is when the competitor moves. A routine is still doing it in week eleven.
01
Which pages need reading rather than diffing?
B2B and SaaS pricing, where the page is half the truth: tiers, seat minimums, usage meters, "starting at" asterisks, regional variants. A pixel diff fires on every marketing reshuffle and stays silent when a seat minimum drops.
A companion reads the page instead. Prisync and Price2Spy are built for e-commerce estates of hundreds or thousands of SKUs, and Visualping answers "did this page change at all", as of this writing.
02
The weekly check, running whether or not you remember
Describe the watch once: these competitors, these pages, these fields (list price per tier, billing-period discount, what moved in or out of each plan). A companion runs it as a scheduled routine and appends a dated row per competitor to a Google Sheet.
When something material moves the summary says so in words: "Their mid tier dropped from three seats minimum to one; list price unchanged." Same shape as the competitor monitoring playbook. Finished runs are on real runs.
03
Eleven weeks of one team’s watch
Three competitors, eighteen mapped SKUs, a Monday routine. Two real repricings (one 8% list increase, one tier restructure that hid the cheap plan), one packaging change worth a sales-enablement note, four promo banners logged as promos.
The history column turned a renewal negotiation into a one-line argument for the ops team: their price went up, yours did not.
04
Who gets the Monday summary?
Decide that before you switch the watch on.
A summary in front of the person who can act on a price move pays for itself the first time a rival undercuts your hero product.
Map their catalog to yours first, since that judgment is where monitors go wrong. Then schedule the looking: a weekly routine that reads each pricing page, tells packaging changes from promos, and appends every check to a dated sheet.
For SaaS pages, where the change that matters is packaging and tiers, a scheduled Strawberry routine reads each page and appends a dated row saying what moved. Prisync and Price2Spy index thousands of SKUs for retail estates, as of this writing.
Weekly is the working default: fast enough to catch a move inside your sales cycle, slow enough that the log stays readable. A routine costs nothing extra to run daily.
It reads the page, so a countdown banner over an unchanged tier table logs as a promo and a changed seat minimum logs as a repricing. Borderline calls arrive flagged in words.