This is a very common use case, I myself hand-coded something similar 13 years ago [1]. Kudos for the choice of RSS!
Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#52Nobody has mentioned, that FreshRSS [0] has built-in web scraper too. It is also easier to use (little bit, imho), than changedetection.io. Works like a charm for me - mostly window shoping thrift shops.
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#53Does anyone here remember WinerWatch? The tool Mark Pilgrim wrote, that monitored changes to blog posts by (the notoriously trollish) Dave Winer? It caused a big stir in the blogosphere in 2003, and Mark took it down very quickly after public blowback. I always thought it was pretty cool and he should have left it up.
One of the very few surviving posts on the matter: https://burningbird.net/forget-the-law-forget-the-technology...
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#54Kudos for the launch. Super useful for people tracking granular updates!
I've built something similar for the startup I'm working at, but across the web with a Natural Language Interface: https://parallel.ai/products/monitor. It can find diffs in previous content or find new pages pertaining to the query depending on the semantics. Hope people on this thread are able to derive value from it.
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#55As a (former) reporter, site monitoring is a big part of what I do on a daily basis and I used many, many such services. I can attest that, at least from the landing page, this seems to be a very good execution of the concept, especially the text-based diffing to easily spot what changed and, most importantly, how. The biggest hurdle for such apps however are 'js-based browser-rendered sites' or whatever they're call…
Thanks, that’s a really good question. Site Spy uses a real browser flow, so it generally handles JS-rendered pages much better than simple HTML-only polling tools. In practice, the trickier cases tend to be sites with aggressive anti-bot protection or messy login/session flows rather than JS itself. I’m trying to make those limitations clearer so people don’t just hit a vague failure and feel let down
Curious how you're thinking about getting around anti-bot protection. I scrape a lot and I've noticed many highly trafficked sites investing in anti-bot measures recently, with the rise of AI browsers and such. Still, cool idea, congrats on the launch.
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#56Looks cool
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#57Will this work on websites that may have Cloudflare captchas popping from time to time?
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#58I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
Yep, changedetection.io is a good project. With Site Spy, I wanted to make the browser-first workflow much easier: install the extension, connect it to the dashboard, click the exact part of the page you care about, and then follow changes as diffs, history, or RSS with very little setup. I can definitely see why the open-source / self-hosted route is appealing too.
Does your project use changedetection.io behind the scenes? When I look at the _All Watches Feed_ the contents of the rss file include;
https://changedetection.ioFeed descriptionhttp://www.rssboard.org/rss-specificationpython-feedgenThu, 12 Mar 2026 10:10:10 +0000Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but this one has a MCP server, costs money, and was presumably made last night!
It's been around for a while and recommended by many. I tried it myself and it's okay.
Are you referring to OP's site? The domain was registered 2026-01-16 so it certainly hasn't been around for a while.
Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS
#60As a (former) reporter, site monitoring is a big part of what I do on a daily basis and I used many, many such services. I can attest that, at least from the landing page, this seems to be a very good execution of the concept, especially the text-based diffing to easily spot what changed and, most importantly, how. The biggest hurdle for such apps however are 'js-based browser-rendered sites' or whatever they're call…
JS-rendered websites are sometimes even better, they usually have some sort of internal API that you can access directly instead of relying on the website styling which may change at any moment.
I'm a fellow reporter who needs to keep tabs on some websites. I used various tools, including running my own Klaxon[1] instance, but these days I find it easier to just quickly vibe-code a crawler and use GitHub Actions to run it periodically. You can make it output an RSS feed, email you, archive it with archive.today, take a screenshot, or trigger whatever action you want.