So you’re trusting those “SEO Tool Comparison” blog posts that are clearly just affiliate farms, updated maybe once a year if you’re lucky? The pricing pages for these platforms change faster than a Kubernetes pod schedule. “Contact Sales” today, a new “Starter” tier tomorrow, enterprise plans that vanish overnight.
I got tired of it. Built a scraper that tracks the pricing pages for Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and a few others. Dumps the HTML, diffs it daily, and alerts on changes. It’s not complicated. The fun part isn’t the tool—it’s watching the tactics.
For example, here’s a snippet from the config that defines what to watch. It’s just a scheduled job.
```yaml
targets:
- name: "ahrefs"
url: "https://ahrefs.com/pricing"
selectors:
- ".plan-header"
- ".price-amount"
check_cadence: "0 12 * * *" # daily
- name: "semrush"
url: "https://www.semrush.com/prices/"
selectors:
- ".js-pricing-plan-name"
- ".js-price-number"
check_cadence: "0 12 * * *"
```
Already caught a “limited-time offer” that lasted 11 months, and a 20% price hike buried in a FAQ update. The real best practice? Assume every public price is a temporary lie. If you’re doing a cost analysis, you’re benchmarking against a moving target. What’s the community’s take—has anyone else seen these platforms quietly shift goalposts on feature availability within a fixed plan?