About SaaS Price Pulse

I built this after getting blindsided by a competitor's pricing change that completely shifted our market positioning. We were pitching against them for a $50K enterprise deal, confidently positioning ourselves as "same features, better price." Turns out they'd dropped their prices 30% two months prior. We looked clueless in the sales call.

That loss hurt. But what hurt more was realizing we had no systematic way to track this. Our "competitive intelligence" was literally a product manager (me) checking 10 competitor pricing pages manually every few weeks. Maybe. If I remembered.

I tried the obvious solution first: built an internal tool with basic HTTP fetching. Worked great for exactly two weeks until modern sites started blocking it. Upgraded to Puppeteer. Ran smoothly until I got busy with other projects and the cron job silently died. Found out three months later when another competitor raised prices and our sales team had no idea.

The real challenge wasn't just fetching pages—it was doing it reliably at scale:

• •Bot detection – ChatGPT, Figma, Linear all block basic automation (needed Playwright stealth mode)
• •Price extraction – Regex can't handle modern pricing pages with dynamic content (AI extraction solved this)
• •Silent failures – Cron jobs die quietly if you don't monitor them (Vercel's built-in logs fixed this)

Six months and three rewrites later, it actually works: 100% success rate on major SaaS sites, daily monitoring with AI verification, visual diffs showing exactly what changed. The tool I wish existed when we lost that enterprise deal.

Now our sales team knows when competitors change pricing before prospects do. Turns out that's worth a lot more than $50K.