Distill costs $12/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $432 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$12/mo Starter, $28/mo Pro — forever is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Hawkwatch: the pay-once alternative
Hawkwatch does the same core job for $34, once. Headless-Chromium price & stock monitoring with screenshot alerts — no quotas, no subscription.
| 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.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Distill's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Hawkwatch is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Hawkwatch — $34, once
Headless-Chromium price & stock monitoring with screenshot alerts — no quotas, no subscription.