🦅 Hawkwatch
Watch any product page for price or stock changes. Unlimited watchers, your server.
Hawkwatch at a glance
| Price | $89, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Distill at $12/mo — roughly $144 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Marketing & SEO |
Hawkwatch features
🎯 Auto price detection
Parses JSON-LD Product/Offer data with og:price and microdata fallbacks — most modern shops work with zero configuration.
🖱️ CSS selector mode
For pages without structured data, paste a selector. Locale-aware parsing: $1,299.00, 1.299,00 €, 1 299,00 kr all parse correctly.
📦 Stock tracking
From JSON-LD availability, an element selector, or a keyword regex against page text — get pinged the second it flips.
🌐 Two fetch engines
Headless Playwright Chromium for JS-rendered shops, or a fast plain HTTP fetch for static pages.
⏰ Polite scheduling
Per-watcher interval (5-min floor), ±10% jitter, serialized checks, exponential backoff on failures, robots.txt warnings.
🔔 Email + webhook alerts
BYO-SMTP email with the screenshot attached, or raw JSON / Discord / Slack-compatible webhooks. Thresholds: any change, below X, or ±N%.
📈 Price history charts
Every check stored in SQLite — per-watcher line chart with stock band, min/max/current stats, full check log.
📸 Screenshots on change
Full-page capture at every change event, shown in a timeline lightbox and attached to alert emails. Auto-pruned beyond 50 per watcher.
$89 once — that's the whole pricing page
Distill charges $12/mo — roughly $144 a year, every year. Hawkwatch is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Hawkwatch inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Hawkwatch guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/hawkwatch-mvp, always. The $89 buys the packaged installer, 1-click setup and updates instead of npm and a terminal.
Can I monitor Amazon with it?
Amazon's Terms of Service prohibit automated access, and Hawkwatch won't pretend otherwise — there's no proxy rotation or captcha solving, and there never will be. For Amazon, use their official Product Advertising API (or camelcamelcamel, which is free).
How does it stay polite to the sites I watch?
Checks identify themselves as HawkwatchBot/1.0, intervals floor at 5 minutes with jitter, checks run one at a time with exponential backoff, and adding a watcher warns you (non-blocking) if robots.txt disallows the path.