Show HN: Monitor websites for changes. Get alerted by Email, Slack and Telegram

Show HN: Monitor websites for changes. Get alerted by Email, Slack and Telegram(webtrackr.io)

8 points by amalantony06 5 years ago | 4 comments

Hello HN,

Webtrackr is my first attempt at building an Indie SaaS app. I've been working on and off on this project for about a year now and it's finally ready. Webtrackr lets you track a section of a webpage or an entire webpage for changes & notifies you by Email, Slack and Telegram on detecting a change.

Webtrackr was born out of me "productizing" a script I'd written to scrape Lenovo's website to alert me on offers while I was shopping for a new Thinkpad. If you're a hacker, it's not too difficult to write a script to crawl & parse a webpage for changes, but this is out of scope of the average user. Besides, even for a developer, scraping webpages today is a non trivial task - a lot of websites block requests that do not originate from a browser and based on IP if too many requests are sent. Additionally with most websites today being heavy on Javacsript, simple scrapers don't quite cut it anymore. This is the problem Webtrackr wishes to solve.

Webtrackr uses Headless Chrome/Puppetter to crawl webpages and requests are routed through a distributed network of proxies to get around being blocked or rate limited by the target websites the user wishes to monitor. So the user can always count on getting notified on changes regardless of the nature of website they're monitoring or the frequency of the checks.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community on Webtrackr. Is this something you'd use?

darrenwestall 5 years ago | |

It’s something I’d bundle in my own product if you had an API, something where I can create/remove trackers and then get alerted to changes via webhook.

If you ever build that let me know, as you say it’s something we could build but I’d rather not deal with everything you described :)

amalantony06 5 years ago | | |

Hi Darren, thank you for the comment! Webhooks is indeed something that's on my immediate to do list. As a matter of fact, it was originally supposed to be a part of the MVP, but was put on hold so that the launch could happen quicker :).

I'd like to understand your use case better and shall drop you an email!

egottlieb 5 years ago | |

Smart idea, although when I navigated over to the pricing link, you do not list your free trial (it renders below the fold). I'd specify that there's a trial option in the pricing section.