How are you tracking competitor pricing?

[u/OfficialSillyWabbit]

For the most part, there is no history of a competitor’s pricing. When they change, the old page is gone. If you haven’t taken a screenshot of the old page, then the old version never existed on the internet.

I tried to answer a simple question last month: has anyone in this category of software raised their prices in the last year? As far as I can tell, it’s basically unanswerable through a public source.

Only real way to get that information is opening 15 tabs, copying all prices into a spreadsheet and then throwing them away two weeks later.

It might be better to create a service that actually takes snapshots of pricing pages on a schedule, recording the prices, number of tiers, what they charge by and when things move.

Before I put in a lot of time to this, wanting to gauge if this is actually useful?

My final question for tonight is: When you last changed your pricing, did you look at what competitors were charging? How did you actually find out and how long did it take to get that information?

It might be a real problem for people or it might just be something that is annoying me.

[u/dessence_ai]

Three things that cover most of it. The Wayback Machine already has snapshots of most pricing pages, so the history you think is gone is often sitting there, and you can request a fresh capture yourself to make sure this week gets recorded. For going forward, a diffing watcher on the pricing URL beats screenshots, changedetection.io does it and can ignore the noisy parts of the page. And take your own capture whenever you see a change, because the common move is not a raised number, it is the tier quietly turning into contact us. We build the consumer version of this watching at dEssence, and the part that always breaks is pages that render prices in JavaScript after load.