Distill.io meters your checks and caps your watchers at $12–28/month, forever. Hawkwatch points a real headless Chromium at any product page, auto-detects the price from structured data, and pings you — with a full-page screenshot — the moment it drops or restocks. Your server, your schedule, no per-check quotas.
If you've searched for a Distill alternative, Hawkwatch is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Hawkwatch is $34, one time, and covers the same core job Distill charges $12/mo for.
What makes Hawkwatch the pick for 2026
- 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.
Hawkwatch vs Distill, at a glance
| Hawkwatch | Distill | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $34 once | $12/mo Starter, $28/mo Pro — forever |
| Watchers | Unlimited | Capped per plan |
| Check quotas | None — your server, your schedule | Metered per month |
| Your data | Your SQLite file, on your machine | Their cloud |
| Screenshots on change | Full-page, stored locally | Higher tiers |
| Alerts | BYO SMTP + any webhook | Plan-dependent |
| Self-hosted | Desktop app or any VPS | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Distill Starter costs $144/year. Hawkwatch pays for itself in under 3 months — and it never bills you again.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/hawkwatch-mvp, always. The $34 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.
The bottom line
Hawkwatch won't out-feature Distill on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $34 once against $12/mo forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Hawkwatch is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Hawkwatch — $34, once
Headless-Chromium price & stock monitoring with screenshot alerts — no quotas, no subscription.