March 11, 2026
Refresh wars, engage
Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
RSS comeback? New web watcher sparks OSS vs subscription brawl
TLDR: Site Spy tracks any webpage, shows what changed with clear visuals, and can ping you by RSS, push, email, or Telegram. Commenters loved the idea but split into camps: open‑source self‑host vs paid subscription, and “RSS is enough” vs “I need instant push,” making this a wallet‑and‑workflow showdown.
A new browser add‑on and dashboard called Site Spy promises to stalk any webpage for changes and blast you alerts the second something shifts — with a clean visual diff that shows green for added stuff and red for removed. It even lets you watch a single price, stock badge, or headline instead of the whole page, and yes, it’s on the Chrome Web Store. The kicker: it can plug into AI helpers like Claude and Cursor via a connector, so your bot can summarize changes for you. RSS (those simple, old‑school news feeds) is a core output, but there are push alerts, email, and Telegram too.
Cue the comments section doing what it does best. The hype crew showed up — “gonna try it,” “bookmarked” — but the real action was a two‑front war. Front one: “RSS is fine” vs “give me push now.” One commenter invoked a high‑stakes “visa appointment” use‑case and pressed for faster, louder alerts. Another poked at whether element‑level tracking is table stakes (it is, per the site), hinting at the nerdy method others use (XPath = a way to target bits of a page).
Front two: the eternal internet debate — open source vs subscription. A fan quickly dropped a link to changedetection.io (run it yourself for free), and another urged the dev to “make it OSS and charge once,” tapping that meme energy: monthly fees are the new jump scare. Verdict? The tool looks slick, but the crowd wants options — and their wallets have opinions.
Key Points
- •Site Spy tracks website changes automatically and displays visual diffs with additions in green and removals in red.
- •Users can monitor entire pages or specific elements, set custom check intervals, and compare snapshots over time.
- •Notifications include browser push, badge counts, email reports, and Telegram messages.
- •A free plan allows 5 sites with hourly checks; Starter (€4/mo) and Pro (€8/mo) add more watches and faster intervals (down to 1 minute).
- •Integrations via the Model Context Protocol allow AI assistants like Claude and Cursor to monitor and summarize changes; setup uses @site-spy/mcp-server via npx.