Distill.io alternative for tracking competitor pricing, terms and careers pages

Fairquery · Updated October 27, 2026

Price side by side, same unit

Here one result is one page check: one Fairquery page check or one Distill.io cloud check. Distill.io counts one cloud check per 10 seconds of check time, so a slow page can count as two or more. Fairquery figures are the Apify pay-per-event prices from the Actor's live Apify pricing (event prices only, no separate compute charges); this Actor has no Actor-start fee, and the optional headless browser costs $5.90 per 1,000 rendered pages. Distill.io figures are monthly prices from its pricing page, checked 2026-10-27; the per-1,000 figures assume the plan’s full allowance is used. Apify plan figures from Apify pricing, checked 2026-10-27.

Result: per check, Distill.io Flexi extra usage ($0.25 per 1,000) is below Fairquery's $0.30 and Professional at full use ($0.35 per 1,000) is close to it, and Distill.io's free plan covers small watchlists at $0. Fairquery costs less when you check fewer pages than a plan’s allowance, because you pay only for checks you run, but each reported change adds $4.90 per 1,000, and above $5 of Apify usage a month you need an Apify paid plan (Starter $19/month, which includes $19 of usage).

Who each tool fits best

The Distill.io points below come from the Distill.io pricing page and the Distill.io features page; the Fairquery points from the Competitor Change Tracker Store page.

Distill.io and the Competitor Change Tracker compared

Facts about Distill.io come from its own public pages, checked on 2026-10-27; each row names its sources, and the full list of sources with check dates is at the end of this page. Plans and prices can change, so check Distill.io’s pricing page before you decide.

What it costs: four example watchlists

Monthly cost for a 30-day month. On the Fairquery side, each page, job-board read or sitemap file fetched is one page check; changes are extra at $4.90 per 1,000, and the optional headless browser adds $5.90 per 1,000 rendered pages; there is no Actor-start fee. You need an Apify account; above $5 of usage a month, an Apify paid plan (Starter: $19/month, includes $19 of usage). On the Distill.io side, the plan shown is the smallest monthly plan with enough cloud monitors and checks on the Distill.io pricing page, assuming each check takes under 10 seconds.

This is not a like-for-like comparison. A Distill.io plan includes a visual selector, apps, version history and alert channels such as SMS and push. The Fairquery tracker includes typed change rows and webhook alerts. Neither one sees a change that is made and reverted between two checks.

How the Fairquery Competitor Change Tracker works

• You choose the pages. Give exact pages with a type (pricing, terms, privacy, careers, changelog, blog, product or generic), plain URLs whose type is guessed from the path, or competitor domains plus the page types to find.
• The first run stores a baseline in a named key-value store in your Apify account and is charged as page checks only. Every later run reports only what changed.
• Pages are compared by type. Pricing pages by plan (name, price, currency, period, per-user unit), legal pages by section, careers pages through the public Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby board APIs, changelogs by entry, and sites by their sitemap.xml URLs.
• Noise is filtered. Scripts, navigation, footers and cookie banners are stripped; timestamps, tokens and cache-busting parameters are masked. A change is confirmed with a second read before it is reported, and a page that alternates between two versions alerts once.
• Each change has a severity. High for price and plan changes and substantive legal edits, medium for larger text, product-page and hiring changes, low for small edits. Set minSeverity to drop the rest.
• Alerts go where you work. Set webhookUrl and webhookFormat (slack, discord or json); only changes at or above webhookMinSeverity (default medium) are sent.
• It is automation-friendly. Schedule it with an Apify Schedule, call it from any language through the Apify API, from n8n, or from an AI agent through Apify MCP.
• It respects robots.txt and reads public pages only.

Limits: plan parsing is heuristic and works best on server-rendered pricing pages; JavaScript-only pages need the optional browser; runs use Apify datacenter IPs, so prices can differ by country; freshness equals your schedule. Full details are in the guide to tracking competitor pricing, terms and careers pages and on the Apify Store page.

How to start

1. Open the Competitor Change Tracker on the Apify Store and sign in to Apify.
2. Enter the pages or domains to watch. A minimal input:

{
  "watchlistName": "competitors",
  "pages": [
    { "url": "https://competitor.example/pricing", "type": "pricing" },
    { "url": "https://competitor.example/terms", "type": "terms" }
  ],
  "domains": ["another-competitor.example"],
  "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/...",
  "webhookFormat": "slack"
}

3. Run it once. The first run stores a baseline for each page and reports no changes.
4. Add an Apify Schedule with the same input, for example daily or hourly.
5. Set a maximum cost per run in the run options; the Actor stops before it exceeds it.
6. Optional: read the change rows from your own code through the Apify API, or let an AI agent call the Actor through Apify MCP.

FAQ

Is the Fairquery Competitor Change Tracker a drop-in replacement for Distill.io?

No. Distill.io is a website change monitor with browser extensions, desktop and mobile apps, a visual selector and cloud monitors for almost any page. The Competitor Change Tracker is an Apify Actor for public competitor pages of known types (pricing, terms, privacy, careers, changelog, sitemap) that returns structured change rows. It replaces Distill.io only if structured data for those page types is what you need.

How much does it cost compared with Distill.io?

The tracker costs $0.30 per 1,000 page checks plus $4.90 per 1,000 changes reported, with no Fairquery subscription and no Actor-start fee. Twenty pages checked hourly is 14,400 checks, $4.32 a month plus changes; that fits Apify Free's $5 monthly credit if no more than 138 changes are reported and you have no other Apify usage, otherwise it needs an Apify paid plan (Starter is $19/month and includes $19 of usage). Distill.io Starter, $15 a month with 30,000 cloud checks and a 10-minute minimum interval, covers that watchlist, according to its pricing page on 2026-10-27. For five pages checked a few times a day, Distill.io's free plan costs nothing, which is cheaper than the tracker.

Can it check a page every few seconds or minutes?

No. The tracker runs as often as your Apify Schedule runs it, typically hourly, daily or weekly, and is not built for minute-by-minute monitoring. Distill.io's cloud monitors check as often as every 6 hours on Free, 10 minutes on Starter, 5 minutes on Professional and 2 minutes on Flexi, and its local monitors can check as often as every 5 seconds.

Can it monitor pages behind a login?

No. The tracker reads public, no-login pages only and respects robots.txt. Distill.io's features page says it can track changes in PDFs and private pages and automate steps like filling forms and clicks.

Does Distill.io or the tracker have an API?

The tracker is called through the Apify API or Apify MCP (mcp.apify.com); it has no Fairquery MCP server of its own. Distill.io's features page lists "API Access for developers and teams on request", plus Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams and webhook integrations.

Is Fairquery affiliated with Distill.io?

No. Distill.io is a trademark of its owner. Fairquery is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Distill.io or Neemb LLC. The name is used only to compare the two products.

Sources

1. Distill.io pricing page: plans and monthly prices, monitors, minimum cloud interval, cloud checks per month, alert, SMS and version-history limits by plan; 20% annual discount; 10-second check units; reCAPTCHA v2 counted as 24 extra checks; unused resources expire; Flexi extra-usage prices. Checked 2026-10-27.
2. Distill.io features page: visual selector; XPath, CSS and regular expressions; local monitors as often as every 5 seconds; conditions; Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams integrations and webhooks; JSON/CSV import and export; API access on request; forms and clicks; custom proxies; PDFs and private pages. Checked 2026-10-27.
3. Apify pricing: Free plan with $5 to spend; Starter $19/month with $19 to spend. Checked 2026-10-27.
4. Fairquery Competitor Change Tracker on the Apify Store: pay-per-event prices, input, output, alerts, limitations; prices also read from the public Apify API. Checked 2026-10-27.

See also the Visualping comparison, all Fairquery tools, all guides and tools for AI agents.