Member OP
I monitor perhaps twelve providers for my small consultancy, and I find that the promotional cycles do not align with my clients' procurement schedules. Let us discuss what tools exist for automated price tracking across hosts. I apologise if this question has been addressed previously.
1. Self-hosted: changedetection.io v0.45.20 with Playwright for JS-rendered pages. I run this on a RackNerd VPS, 2 vCPU/2GB, checks 47 URLs every 6 hours. CPU sits at 12%.
2. Telegram bots: I have used HostPriceBot (unofficial, GitHub archived 2024-03) and KnownHost's own alert channel, though the latter only tracks their SKUs.
3. Browser extension: Honey is useless here. PriceSpider's B2B module requires $$$$ contract.
Practical recommendation: changedetection.io + ntfy for push. Set CSS selectors on the pricing table div, not the whole page, or you will alert on every blog post. I filter for price drop >15% or new coupon code appearance.
2 vCPU for 47 URLs? What interval, 6h or less?
6 hours exactly. The 12% is burstable, not sustained -- Playwright launches, renders, diffs, dies. Memory is the real bottleneck at 2GB; I had to raise swap to 4GB after a few concurrent jobs crashed into OOM. If I were doing it again I would go 3GB RAM minimum.
Member
In Latvia we have this problem with VAT. Many US hosts quote ex-VAT, then 21% lands at checkout. A price tracker that does not capture the final invoice total is tracking fiction. I scrape the cart flow, not the marketing page.
Member OP
This is precisely my difficulty. My clients in Kansai run fiscal years April-March. RackNerd's Black Friday cycle is November. The gap is six months of awkward explanations.
I run one VPS. One. The idea of monitoring twelve providers sounds like the opposite of "one quiet mind." I just check LowEndBox twice a year and buy whatever is cheapest in Tokyo.
Member
Mumbai here. I resell to small shops. The problem is not tracking the price, it is tracking the usable price -- half these hosts block Indian cards, or add 3% forex, or PayPal decides it is feeling suspicious that day.
This is smarter than my setup. I have false positives every time RackNerd changes their "setup fee" wording from $0 to "FREE (limited time)" -- same cost, different HTML, alert fires. Cart flow would solve it but requires session cookies and I do not want to store payment-adjacent credentials on a VPS.
Member
I wrote a small Python script with Scrapy and price-parser. Runs on my home Proxmox in Munich. It emails me. No Telegram, no ntfy, no cloud. The German in me appreciates that the only dependency is my own DSL line failing.
