FollowThatPage Pro limits explained, and when to move on

FollowThatPage Pro is the paid tier of Follow That Page, a long-running page change service that emails you when a site you follow is edited. Most people never need it. Some hit the free limits within a week. This piece lays out what each account actually allows, how the check queue behaves when you go over, what the paid terms say, and at what point an operator is better off with a different kind of tool, such as AyeWatch.

Free vs Pro, in numbers

Follow That Page counts checks per user, not pages. You can add as many pages as you like; the quota decides how often they get looked at.

The daily run starts at 8:00 in the morning, Central European time. A newly added page gets its first check within a few minutes. Ten minutes is the fastest interval on any account, a deliberate choice to avoid overloading small websites.

The public site does not list a Pro price. The terms say Pro runs on a PayPal subscription you cancel in PayPal, that the service will refund you if PayPal charges after you stopped using it and you get in touch, and that there are no refunds halfway through the year.

What happens when you go over

This is the part that trips people up. Follow That Page does not reject extra pages; it queues them.

• On a free account, set 30 pages to daily and the first 20 are checked in the morning run. The other 10 wait until the next day, so each page is really checked less than once a day.
• Set five pages to hourly on a free account and they take turns. Each is checked once every five hours.

So the effective check rate for any one page is your quota divided by your page count. A team watching 40 pricing pages hourly would need more than the 20 hourly checks Pro offers.

The costs that are not on an invoice

For a business, the bigger costs of a simple diff service are usually time and reliability, not the subscription.

Reading diffs. Every email lists added and removed lines. Someone has to read them and decide whether any of it matters. Line and block filters help, but they match keywords, so they need upkeep as pages change.

Coverage gaps. The robot does not run JavaScript and will never follow password-protected pages. Pages that render with scripts can come through incomplete.

Key-person risk. The FAQ is candid: one developer runs it as a hobby alongside a day job and a family, so fixes and features can take a long time. A hardware failure caused a long outage in May 2023.

None of that is a criticism of a free hobby service. It is a reason to be careful about building a business process on it.

How AyeWatch handles the same job

AyeWatch's plans start at $9 a month. There are no contracts or cancellation fees, and you keep access to the end of the period if you cancel.

There is no queue to plan around. Rather than sharing a fixed number of checks per interval between your pages, each AyeWatch monitor gets its own pace. Auto mode adjusts frequency on its own, speeding up when a page is active and slowing down when it is quiet, and Custom lets you choose the interval yourself for the pages you care about most. You stop doing arithmetic about which page waits its turn.

What the money buys besides checks

The bigger difference is what an alert is. AyeWatch reads each change against a rule you write in a sentence and sends a short summary only when the change matches. One monitor can cover several URLs. Alerts go to the feed and to push on iOS and Android on every plan; paid plans add email, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and a REST API. Topic monitors also follow subjects across the web and six social platforms.

When to stay, when to move

Stay on Follow That Page, free or Pro, if you watch a modest number of plain pages, email is the only channel you need, and you are comfortable filtering diffs yourself.

Move when the reading time adds up, when alerts need to reach a team channel, or when the work is important enough that you want a commercial service behind it. AyeWatch's Free Preview, three runs with no card, is a cheap way to test that on your noisiest page. AyeWatch also publishes a side-by-side with Follow That Page.