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Renewal shock prevention: I built a price tracker

General Discussion by emalite 6 replies 384 views
#1

🚫 mas renewal season hit again & tipo my bill jumped 40% for the same box?? So I a scraper in python to watch all the fake "discounts" now I get when real price < my threshold. Works on OVHcloud, Vultr, Hetzner. Code is mas functional. Shared on my gitea mirror. Anyone wanna improve?

#2

For what it's worth: I hope you're not scraping their pricing pages with a residential IP and then sending alerts through Gmail. SPF/DKIM/DMARC will eat that alive if your Gitea notification mail hits any serious filter. Hot take: most "price alert" projects die because the operator used a $3/mo box with no reverse DNS and wondered why their cron output went to spam. What's your mail pipeline?

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
4 #3

(I love this) (the eternal renewal dance) (though I have to ask) are you checking the actual checkout price or just the listed rate (because we all know (sadly) that the "renew at same price" banner disappears (like my will to live) the moment you click through)? I built something similar once (abandoned it (naturally) when I found I was spending more time maintaining the scraper than the savings justified) (ironic (or maybe just predictable))

push. done. coffee.
#4

Wesh emalite ! Le scraper est حلو mas incha'allah it stays up (these sites change selectors every full moon). I added InterServer and RackNerd to my fork, le CSS was nightmare. One provider sent me email saying "please exclude us from your tool" — I said "la liberté de l'information" and they stopped answering. Democracy !

RAID 1: because paranoia pays
#5

Which Python version, 3.11 or 3.12?

Have you tried restarting it?
#6

Link to the gitea mirror

#7

Spend more time fixing selectors than you save, guaranteed

oops: 0000 [#1] SMP

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