Let’s be honest. You know you should be tracking competitor prices. Sometimes you do. You open a few pages, look at a price, think “hmm” for a moment and move on. That is not a strategy. It is a reaction.
Let’s look at three ways to actually do price monitoring. No slogans, with real numbers. If you first want to understand why price monitoring matters at all, read the separate article on it. Here we focus on the choice.
Three options
There are essentially three options. No more appear, however much you hope.
SaaS platform: a ready-made tool. It works. It costs.
Self-built scraper: a developer builds it. It works... until it stops. It costs more.
Manual: you do it. Free. You pay with time.
The choice depends on two things: how big your catalogue is and how expensive you consider your time.
Comprice
Comprice is a price monitoring platform built for online shops in the Baltics and Nordics. Its central difference is AI-based product matching. The system does not rely only on the EAN code, it also uses image recognition and text analysis. When a competitor renames the same product or swaps the image, it does not drop out of monitoring.
Online shops are creative with names and descriptions. The system has to understand that. A human should not have to check it by hand.
Coverage
Dozens of Baltic and Nordic online shops are monitored. The number of products depends on the plan. Data updates daily and price history accumulates automatically.
Pricing
Pricing depends on the size of the product catalogue and the features you need. Ask for a quote and we will put together a solution to fit your needs.
Pros
- Setup in under an hour
- No maintenance
- AI product matching
- Alerts and price history
- Market position overview
- API access
Cons
- Needs a product feed
- A monthly cost
A self-built scraper
The idea seems straightforward: you hire a developer, they write a script that collects prices from competitors’ pages. A few months later the system exists and it feels like things are under control.
Then one competitor changes the structure of their website. Another adds bot protection. A third one shows up and it turns out to be a new development project. Maintenance is not a one-off task but a continuous process.
Costs
Development: 5,000 – 25,000 €
Maintenance: 5,000 – 20,000 € a year
Server: 500 – 2,000 € a year
First year total: 15,000 – 60,000 €.
Pros
- Full control
- The data is yours
- Customisable
Cons
- High cost
- Needs constant maintenance
- You have to build proper product matching yourself
- Development time in months
And an uncomfortable fact: the system tends to fail exactly when a campaign is running and you need the most accurate data.
Manual
You open a competitor’s page. Find the product. Write the price into a table. Move to the next one. It is work that requires no technology, but it requires persistence.
Costs
Tool: free (Excel, Google Sheets)
Time cost: 4–8 hours a week
Real cost: your time
Pros
- Free
- You can start right away
- Gives a good feel for the market
Cons
- Becomes unmanageable quickly
- Human errors are inevitable
- No alerts
- Price history does not build up automatically
- You cannot see stock systematically
It works at first. But when you notice you spend more time rewriting prices than thinking about them, that is already a signal.
The numbers side by side
Setup time
Comprice: < 1 hour
Self-built: 2–6 months
Manual: immediate
AI product matching
Comprice: yes (EAN + image and text analysis)
Self-built: no
Manual: no
Alerts
Comprice: yes
Self-built: must be developed
Manual: no
Price history
Comprice: automatic
Self-built: must be developed
Manual: none
First-year cost
Comprice: custom quote
Self-built: 15,000 – 60,000 €
Manual: 200–400 hours of your time
What to choose?
Under 30 products: manual is perfectly reasonable. You understand how the market moves and get to know your competitors.
50–500 products: a SaaS solution is the rational choice. Building a scraper at this stage is about as logical as building your own petrol station because you own a car.
1,000+ products: custom SaaS or a self-built solution, if you have a team to develop and maintain it. In practice custom SaaS is often faster and cheaper than building from scratch.
For most online shops this means one thing: a ready-made platform. It is not sensible to reinvent AI-based product matching and automated alerts when they already exist.
If you want to see how it works for your shop, book a 30-minute demo. Better to look at your own data than to listen to theory.
Read also: price monitoring software overview and e-shop price monitoring.