If you care about staying competitive, you have to keep an eye on what your rivals are charging. But obsessively checking competitor websites or chasing rumors isn’t just tedious—it’s a waste of brainpower. This guide is for product marketers, pricing analysts, founders, or anyone else who wants a no-nonsense way to actually monitor pricing changes in their industry, with less manual effort.
We'll walk through using Crayon, one of the better-known tools for competitive intelligence. You’ll learn what works, what to skip, and how to get useful alerts without drowning in noise.
Why bother with pricing monitoring?
- You’ll catch sudden price drops or increases before your customers do.
- You can back up pricing decisions with actual data, not hunches.
- You’ll spot trends—like who’s discounting, who’s bundling, and who’s quietly hiking fees.
Old-school methods (Google Alerts, screenshots, random spreadsheets) just don’t scale. Crayon automates a lot of the grunt work, but like any tool, it’s only as smart as you set it up.
Step 1: Get your Crayon account set up
You’ll need a Crayon account with access to competitive monitoring features. Pricing isn’t public; expect to talk to sales. (If you’re just dabbling, start with a trial or demo.)
Pro tip: Don’t get upsold on add-ons you won’t use. For pricing monitoring, you mostly need web page change tracking and alerting.
What to watch out for: Crayon is powerful, but it’s not cheap. If you only care about tracking a couple of competitor sites, a simple website change monitor might do. But if you need scale, or you want pricing intel pulled into one dashboard, it’s worth a look.
Step 2: List the competitors (and pages) that actually matter
Before you start plugging stuff into Crayon, get clear about what you want to track. More isn’t always better; tracking every name in your industry just creates noise.
Make a shortlist: - Your top 3–8 direct competitors (not every random SaaS in the directory) - The actual URLs where pricing appears (not just homepages) - Any resellers or big “gray market” sources, if that’s relevant in your space
Don’t bother with: - Companies so small or different that their pricing doesn’t affect you - News articles about “industry pricing trends”—those are lagging indicators
Pro tip: Pricing pages aren’t always obvious. Sometimes pricing hides behind signups, calculators, or quote forms. Crayon can track some behind-login content, but you’ll have to work with their team to set that up.
Step 3: Add competitor pricing pages to your Crayon tracking
Now for the grunt work—tell Crayon exactly which pages to monitor.
Here’s how to do it:
- Log in to Crayon.
- Go to the “Track” or “Monitored Pages” section. (Names change as they update the UI, but it’s usually front and center.)
- Add each competitor’s pricing URL.
- Paste in the direct link to their pricing page.
- Give it a clear, human-readable name (e.g., “Acme SaaS – Pricing”).
- Set the monitoring frequency.
- Daily is fine for most. Hourly is overkill unless you’re in airline tickets or crypto.
- (Optional) Add rules for subpages or deep links.
- Some pricing is split across “Plans,” “Enterprise,” etc. Add those, too.
What works: Crayon’s change detection is solid for public web pages—if someone changes a price or plan name, you’ll get an alert.
What doesn’t: If pricing is behind a login, buried in PDFs, or split across a complicated calculator, Crayon sometimes misses it. Be realistic about what’s actually trackable.
Step 4: Tweak your alert settings (so you don’t drown in notifications)
By default, Crayon can be noisy—every tiny content tweak, every “$29.99” swapped for “$29.” You want to get alerted to real pricing changes, not typos or A/B test tweaks.
Set smarter alert rules:
- Trigger only on key phrases: Use filters like “price,” “plan,” “starting at,” or specific currency symbols.
- Ignore cosmetic changes: Most of the time, you can skip alerts for style changes, footers, or minor text tweaks.
- Batch notifications: Instead of getting pinged for every change, get a daily or weekly digest.
Pro tip: Set up Slack or email integration for alerts. Don’t rely on logging into the dashboard—you’ll forget.
Watch out for: False positives. Sometimes, a changed promo or seasonal banner triggers an alert. Learn to ignore these, or refine your filters.
Step 5: Review changes and sanity-check the data
So, you’re getting alerts. Now what? The real work is turning those alerts into actual insight.
Build a quick routine:
- Scan the change summary: Crayon shows a before-and-after view of the page.
- Check for real pricing moves: Did a competitor raise, lower, or restructure a plan? Or was it just a copy edit?
- Log meaningful changes: Make a note (in your own tracker, spreadsheet, or even inside Crayon) of actual pricing updates. Ignore the rest.
- Share with your team: If something matters, flag it in Slack, email, or whatever channel you use.
Be skeptical: Not every “change” is a pricing change. Sometimes sites experiment with wording or hide prices entirely for a while. Don’t overreact to every alert.
Step 6: Analyze trends, not just one-offs
Now that you’ve got a few weeks or months of data, look for patterns.
Look for: - How often do competitors change prices? - Are there seasonal patterns (e.g., Black Friday discounts)? - Is anyone slowly creeping up prices, or introducing new tiers? - Who’s quietly dropping features or shifting things to “contact sales”?
What to ignore: Outliers. One-off discounts, typos, or panic sales aren’t trends. Focus on sustained changes.
Pro tip: If your company has a pricing committee or regular strategy sync, bring these trends—not just alerts—to the table. Raw data is less useful than a clear “Here’s what’s shifting, and here’s what it might mean.”
Step 7: Iterate and fine-tune
No competitive intel process is ever “done.” If your alerts feel noisy, tweak the filters. If you’re missing changes, review your tracked pages.
Every few months: - Prune competitors who aren’t changing prices (or aren’t relevant anymore) - Add new entrants or disruptors in your market - Update URLs if pricing pages move or get hidden
Don’t: Try to automate strategic thinking. Crayon is a tool—use it to save time, not to replace your own judgment.
What Crayon does well (and where it’s not magic)
Works well for: - Surface-level pricing changes on public competitor pages - Keeping a clean record of when and how pricing shifted - Integrating with Slack, email, or CRM for alerting
Falls short if: - Pricing is hidden, dynamic, or only visible to logged-in users - You need deep analysis of pricing psychology or willingness to pay (that’s on you) - You’re hoping for a “set it and forget it” magic bullet
Ignore the hype: Crayon won’t tell you why competitors changed prices, or what to do about it. It just helps you see what’s changed, faster.
Keep it simple, keep it useful
Don’t over-engineer your pricing monitoring. Start basic: track the right competitors, set up sane alerts, and check in regularly. Iterate as you go. The goal isn’t to react to every blip; it’s to notice real shifts before they become problems—or opportunities.
If you keep things simple and tune out the noise, you’ll have a pricing radar that actually works, without eating your whole week.