Changedetection io pricing for founders: free, $8.99 or $9

Founders usually look up changedetection io pricing because somebody on the team wants to track competitor pages, supplier price lists or a regulator's notices, and the open source option sounds free. It is, in one sense. This piece breaks down what each way of running it costs, what you get from a hosted alternative at almost the same price, and where the real spending goes.

The three price points

$0: self-hosted changedetection.io. The software is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. You run it with Docker or Python on a machine you already have. There is no license fee and no cap on watches.

$8.99 a month: changedetection.io hosted. The project's own subscription gives you a private cloud login, up to 5,000 URL watches, rechecks from roughly every five minutes, one Chrome browser for JavaScript pages, and proxies in Europe and the US. Paying yearly gets two months free.

From $9 a month: AyeWatch. A hosted AI monitor that reads each change against a rule you write in plain English and sends a short summary. It runs on the web, iOS and Android, with a Free Preview of three runs and no card.

On sticker price, the two hosted options are within a cent of each other. The difference is in what each one asks of your team.

Where the money actually goes

For a small company, the license is rarely the expensive part. People are. A monitor costs you in three places.

Setup time. Self-hosting means someone provisions a server, runs the container, puts it behind a login if it needs to be reachable, and sets up backups. The hosted changedetection.io plan removes most of that. AyeWatch removes all of it.

Tuning time. changedetection.io works by comparing text and selected elements. On a competitor's site, that means writing CSS or XPath selectors, then ignore rules for dates, counters and banners that change on every load. Each redesign can break a selector. The project now lets you connect your own AI model to filter alerts by intent, which helps, but someone has to pick the model, manage the key and pay that bill separately.

AyeWatch skips this step. You write one sentence per monitor, such as "tell me if they change plan prices or add a new tier", and it only alerts when a change fits.

Reading time. A raw diff of a page needs a person to interpret it. A summary that says what changed in plain words can go straight into a Slack channel and be understood by whoever reads it. AyeWatch sends summaries by default.

A worked example

Say you want to watch five competitors: pricing, changelog and careers pages for each, so 15 URLs.

AyeWatch can put several URLs in one monitor under one rule, which is why 15 watches become 5 monitors. It also watches topics, so the same plan can follow press coverage and posts on X, Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube about each competitor.

When the cheaper path is right

If you have an engineer who enjoys this kind of tooling, need logged-in pages handled with Browser Steps, or have to keep data on your own servers, self-hosted changedetection.io is the right call and the price is unbeatable. If you track thousands of URLs, its $8.99 plan with a 5,000 URL allowance is hard to match.

For most early teams, though, the scarce resource is attention, not $9. AyeWatch is the better spend because nobody has to maintain it and the alerts arrive already explained. See the AyeWatch plans or read its side-by-side with changedetection.io before you decide.