How to track competitor prices: free and paid ways

By the PeekRival team · Updated 30 October 2026

You lose a deal, and only later find out that a competitor cut their price two weeks earlier. This guide shows four ways to track competitor prices, from a spreadsheet to dedicated software. For each one you see what it costs in money and time, and where it stops working.

Short answer: list the competitor pages you care about, then pick the method that fits how many prices you watch. A spreadsheet works for up to about 20, free tools for a few pages, your own scraper if you have a developer, and price monitoring software for catalogs of 100 products or more.

4 ways to track competitor prices at a glance

The right method depends mostly on two things: how many prices you watch, and how fast you need to know about a change.

Method 1: Check by hand and log prices in a spreadsheet

For a short list of competitors, a spreadsheet is simple and free. Make one row per product or plan, and columns for the competitor, the URL, the date, the price, and a note (sale, bundle, out of stock). Check on the same weekday each time so changes are easy to spot.

Can Google Sheets fetch prices automatically?

Partly. IMPORTXML(url, xpath) pulls a value from a page into a cell. It works on simple pages, but it has real limits:

• It reads the HTML the server sends. If a page builds its prices with JavaScript, the formula may find nothing.
• When the competitor changes their page layout, your XPath breaks silently.
• It does not alert you when a value changes. You still have to look.

As a rule of thumb, a spreadsheet gets hard to keep up once you track more than a few dozen prices, or when you need to react within a day.

Method 2: Free tools and checkers

One-off checks

When you only want to know what a competitor charges today, a free checker is the fastest way. The PeekRival price checker reads a public page and lists the prices it finds. For online shops it uses the product data shops publish for Google (name, price, currency, stock). For pricing pages it reads the visible prices and the plan names around them.

Two examples from 30 October 2026. An Allbirds product page returned "Men's Tree Runner, $100, in stock" from the product data. Linear's pricing page returned two plans from the page text:

The limits: it checks one page at a time, it cannot read prices that a page loads only with JavaScript, and some large shops block automated visits.

Free tiers of monitoring tools

• Pricefy has a free plan with 50 products, 5 competitors and one update a day.
• Visualping monitors web pages for changes. Its free plan covers 5 pages and 150 checks a month.
• PageCrawl also monitors web pages for changes, with 6 pages and 220 checks a month for free.
• changedetection.io is open source, and you can run it on your own server.

Sources: pricefy.io/pricing, visualping.io/pricing, pagecrawl.io/pricing, retrieved 30 October 2026.

Method 3: Build your own scraper

With a developer, you can write a script (for example in Python) or use an automation tool such as n8n or Apify to fetch pages on a schedule, extract prices and store them. This gives you full control and works for unusual sites.

Plan for the work after the first version: product matching (which competitor product equals yours), pages that change their layout, sites that block bots, and pages that need a real browser. This work keeps coming back after the script runs for the first time.

Method 4: Price monitoring software

Dedicated tools match your products to competitor products, check them on a schedule and show the history. Entry prices on 30 October 2026, from the vendors' own pricing pages:

• Prisync: from $99 a month for 100 products, with unlimited competitors and updates three times a day. 14-day free trial.
• Pricefy: free plan, then from $49 a month for 100 products.
• Price2Spy: no prices on its pricing page; a 14-day free trial.

Sources: prisync.com/pricing, pricefy.io/pricing, price2spy.com/pricing, retrieved 30 October 2026.

We list their plans and limits in price monitoring software compared.

Tracking SaaS and B2B pricing pages

Software and B2B pricing pages need a different eye than shop products:

• Plans, not products. Track each plan's price, what it includes and its limits (seats, usage, features). A limit moved from one plan to another is a price change, too.
• Monthly vs annual. Record whether the price you saw is billed monthly or yearly.
• "Contact sales". When the top plan has no price, note when that changed, and look for hints in the plan description.
• Cadence. If a competitor's pricing page rarely changes, a weekly check is a sensible start. What matters is not missing the change.

What to track besides the price

• Sale price vs regular price, and how long promotions run
• Shipping costs and free-shipping thresholds
• Stock status: a competitor out of stock is a chance for you
• New and discontinued products or plans
• Different prices per country or currency

Is tracking competitor prices legal?

Looking at prices that a competitor publishes openly is normal market practice. A few rules keep you on the safe side: respect the site's terms and its robots.txt, do not log in or get around blocks to collect data, keep request volumes low, and never agree prices with competitors, which competition law forbids. In Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2014 (I ZR 224/12) that automatically reading data from public websites is not in itself unfair competition, as long as no technical protection is bypassed. This is general information, not legal advice; for automated collection at scale, ask a lawyer in your country.

Get an alert when a competitor changes a price

Checking by hand works until you forget. PeekRival will email you when a competitor changes a price, starts a discount or runs out of stock, and tell you which product, by how much and when. Alerts are in early access: run a check, click "Watch this price", and we contact you when your spot opens. Nothing is charged.

FAQ

How can I track competitor prices for free?

For a few products, check the pages by hand and log the prices in a spreadsheet. For one-off checks, use a free price checker. Free tiers of tools such as Visualping (5 pages) or Pricefy (50 products) cover small setups.

How often should I check competitor prices?

Match how often your competitors change prices. For pricing pages that rarely change, weekly is a sensible start. For shops that change prices often, check daily or more.

Can I track prices on JavaScript-heavy or SaaS pricing pages?

Spreadsheet formulas and simple checkers, including ours, read the HTML the server sends, so they can miss prices that a page loads with JavaScript. Tools that load the page in a real browser can read them.

Is it legal to monitor competitor prices?

Looking at openly published prices is generally accepted. Respect terms and robots.txt, do not bypass logins or blocks, and never agree prices with competitors. Not legal advice.

How do I get notified when a competitor changes its price?

Use a page-change tool for a handful of pages, or price monitoring software for whole catalogs. PeekRival price alerts are in early access.