The price anchor
| Hawkwatch | Distill | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $12/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $144 |
| 5-year total | $89 | $720 |
| 10-year total | $89 | $1,440 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($12/mo, ~$144/yr); the Hawkwatch column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Distill Starter costs $144/year. Hawkwatch pays for itself in under 8 months — and it never bills you again.
- After 1 year: Hawkwatch has cost you $89 total — Distill has cost $144.
- After 3 years: Hawkwatch is still $89 — the subscription is at $432.
- After 5 years: Hawkwatch is still $89 — the subscription is at $720.
What you get for $89 once
- 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.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $89 is the whole price.
Pricing questions
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.
Do I need a server?
No. Desktop mode runs everything in an Electron window. For 24/7 monitoring while your PC sleeps, a $5 VPS with the included Docker setup is the better home — Distill's cloud does have the always-on part built in, to be fair.
Hawkwatch — $89, one time
Or get Hawkwatch plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.