A free website monitor can keep an eye on a few competitor prices, supplier pages, or policy updates. The important question is whether its allowance covers those pages as often as you need, and whether checks keep running when your computer is off.
PageCrawl Free includes up to 1,100 Fast cloud checks a month, the largest monthly cloud-check allowance among the free plans compared here. Its 220 check credits cover one supported page checked hourly for a full 30 days: 720 Fast checks use 144 credits, leaving 76 spare. Fast is available on every plan, including Free; it does not take screenshots or interact with pages.
Last reviewed: November 8, 2026. Written by the PageCrawl team using the official pricing and documentation linked below. This is a documentation comparison, not a controlled test of detection accuracy. Limits can change.
Which website monitoring tools have a permanent free plan?
PageCrawl, Visualping, Distill, and ChangeTower offer hosted free plans. Changedetection.io offers free software you run yourself, with the computer and upkeep supplied by you. Sken.io offers a trial rather than a permanent free plan. Choose between them using the pages, schedule, and alerts your work needs.
| Tool | Free pages | Hosted checking allowance | Main consideration |
|---|---|---|---|
| PageCrawl | 6 | 220 credits/month: up to 1,100 Fast checks or 220 browser checks; hourly or slower | Team chat and mobile alerts, price tracking, 15 AI credits/month |
| Visualping | 5 | 150 cloud checks/month; hourly or slower | AI summaries and email or Telegram alerts; a small check allowance |
| Distill | 25 total, up to 5 in the cloud | 1,000 cloud checks/month; every 6 hours or slower | Other pages run on your own device; alert limits also apply |
| ChangeTower | 3 | Daily checks; no separate monthly check allowance listed | Email alerts, AI monitoring, 30 days of snapshot history |
| Changedetection.io | No fixed software page allowance | You provide the hosting and capacity | Requires someone to set up, maintain, and keep it running |
These are separate kinds of limits. A plan that permits hourly checks may not include enough checks to run every page hourly all month. A local monitor uses your own computer; a cloud monitor runs on the service's computers.
How much can you monitor without paying?
Free plans can cover a small daily watchlist or a closer watch on one page. PageCrawl Free can check one supported page hourly with Fast for 144 credits over 30 days. Alternatively, six pages checked daily with browser checks use 180 of its 220 credits, leaving 40 spare.
| Example schedule | Checks in 30 days | Fits the stated free allowance? |
|---|---|---|
| 6 PageCrawl pages, daily | 180 | Yes, with 40 checks left |
| 1 Visualping page, hourly | 720 | No. Its 150 checks cover about 6.3 days at this pace |
| 5 Distill cloud pages, every 6 hours | 600 | Yes, if each visit uses one check unit |
| 1 page, hourly | 720 | Too many for PageCrawl Free with browser checks; fits with Fast at 144 credits. Distill Free cloud checks cannot run hourly |
These examples assume a 30-day period. PageCrawl browser checks use one check credit each. Fast uses one-fifth of a credit, so supported pages can run more often within the same allowance. Fast cannot take screenshots or interact with a page. Setup and extra visits also use credits. Distill counts cloud usage in ten-second units, so a slow visit can consume several checks; see its cloud and local monitoring guide.
For a business example, watch two supplier price pages, two competitor offer pages, and two customer-facing policy pages daily. That gives a small team a useful starting watchlist without pretending a free plan can cover an entire market. Try the check-budget calculator to compare schedules.
What does each free monitoring tool include?
The best fit depends on what you need after a change is found. Some tools emphasize AI summaries, others let you run frequent checks on your own computer, and others provide a small daily watchlist. Compare the alerts and saved history as carefully as the page allowance.
PageCrawl: the most free cloud checks in this comparison
PageCrawl Free includes six pages, 220 monthly check credits, and 15 monthly AI credits. Those check credits cover up to 1,100 Fast checks or 220 browser checks. It can track text, prices, stock status, and other details, with highlighted changes and saved history. AI credits are a separate allowance.
Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, webhooks, and Google Sheets connections are available on Free. The iPhone and Android app can deliver push notifications. The API and MCP connection are also available on every plan.
Main limit: the check budget suits light use. Selecting hourly checks for all six pages would need 4,320 visits over 30 days: 4,320 credits with browser checks or 864 with Fast. Both exceed the free allowance. Automatic page discovery and saved website logins require Standard or above. Free users can watch an existing feed, but that is different from automatically creating monitors for new pages.
Best for: a few supplier, competitor, or policy pages where useful alerts and separate price or stock tracking matter. Standard starts at $8/month for 100 pages and 15,000 checks.
Visualping: five pages with a small check allowance
Visualping Free includes five pages and 150 cloud checks per month, with hourly or slower checking, according to its plan guide saved on November 8, 2026. It includes AI summaries and lets you describe which changes matter. These features still depend on the number of checks available.
Main limit: one page checked hourly needs 720 checks over 30 days. Visualping Free's 150 checks cover about 6.3 days at that pace. Five pages checked daily use all 150 checks in 30 days, leaving none for extra visits. Monitoring pauses when you run out until the allowance resets or you upgrade.
Best for: a few pages checked occasionally, with AI summaries and email or Telegram alerts. Its saved notification guide lists those channels on Free; built-in Slack, Teams, and Discord connections require Business or Solutions. See our Visualping and PageCrawl comparison for the other differences.
Distill: more local monitors if your computer stays on
Distill Free includes 25 monitors in total, up to five running in the cloud. Its cloud allowance is 1,000 checks per month, with a six-hour minimum interval. The free plan also lists 30 email alerts and 100 push notifications per month. Checks and alerts have separate limits.
The other monitors can run through Distill's browser extension or desktop app. Its local monitoring documentation describes unlimited local checks, but your device and the relevant browser or app must remain running. Closing them stops those checks.
Main limit: the larger page count does not mean 25 pages are checked for you while your computer is off. The six-hour cloud interval also matters for changes that disappear quickly.
Best for: someone comfortable keeping a computer online, or a few slow-changing pages in the cloud. Starter costs $15/month.
ChangeTower: three pages checked daily
ChangeTower's pricing page lists a permanent free plan with three pages checked daily, AI monitoring, content and keyword monitoring, email alerts, and 30 days of snapshot history. Compare its stated daily schedule with the updates you need.
Main limit: selecting particular sections starts on Essential; selecting individual elements starts on Business. Slack, webhooks, MCP, and scheduled email reports are Business features, rather than free-plan benefits.
Best for: three pages where a daily update and email alert are enough. The entry paid plan, Lite, costs $12/month for 25 daily pages.
Changedetection.io: free software with your own hosting
Changedetection.io is open-source software. You can run it without a software subscription, but someone must provide the computer, install updates, and look after it. The number of pages and achievable schedule depend on that setup; free software does not provide unlimited computing capacity.
The project supports selected page areas, price and restock tracking, notification integrations, and AI summaries using your own AI account. AI-provider charges may apply. Its hosted service costs $8.99/month and advertises up to 5,000 watches, with checking speed dependent on the available runners. That is a paid service, not a hosted free plan.
Best for: a technical colleague who wants to operate the system. For a team that just needs updates, include maintenance time in the decision. Our self-hosted versus managed comparison covers that trade-off.
Is Sken.io free, or is it a trial?
Sken.io offers a 14-day trial with 140 checks, rather than a permanent free plan. Its pricing page lists a paid Basic plan at €3/month for 500 checks, with intervals as short as one minute. The fastest setting does not mean those checks last a month.
For example, checking one page every minute uses 1,440 checks a day. A small allowance can be useful for a brief, time-sensitive task, but compare the total checks with the period you need to cover before choosing a paid plan.
How do you make a small free watchlist useful?
Start with pages tied to a decision someone will make, then choose how quickly that person needs the update. A daily policy check may be enough; a short restock may need faster checking. Watch the relevant price, paragraph, or stock status, and make sure the first saved result contains it.
- Choose specific pages. Use the supplier's delivery page or the competitor's pricing page, rather than a general homepage.
- Reduce unwanted alerts. Select the part you care about. This can reduce noise, but it does not reduce the number of scheduled visits or automatically save checks.
- Test delivery. Send updates to the inbox, chat, or mobile app the responsible person actually uses.
- Review the saved changes. Check whether a summary matches the page and whether useful changes are being filtered out.
Business example: Netflix's US Standard plan changed from $17.99 to $19.99/month between saved pages from March 22 and April 1, 2026. PageCrawl highlights the old and new prices.
You can use different services for different pages. Keep the setup understandable: know which computer runs any local checks, who receives each alert, and where the history is stored. Our guide to monitoring website changes covers the setup choices.
When is it worth paying for monitoring?
Pay when your needed schedule exceeds the free allowance, when more people need to work with the results, or when you need features such as saved logins and longer history. Faster checks help only if they run successfully and someone can act on the update. Choose based on your actual watchlist.
PageCrawl Standard's 15,000 check credits can cover 20 pages checked hourly for 30 days with browser checks, using 14,400 credits. For pages that work with Fast, the same allowance can cover 100 hourly pages for 14,400 credits. Its 100-page limit still does not mean all 100 can run every 15 minutes all month. The current pricing page lists the limits separately.
For personal monitoring, PageCrawl Relay is available on every plan, including Free, without an additional PageCrawl fee. You provide an online computer and bandwidth; normal limits still apply. For business monitoring, we recommend Enterprise or Ultimate and their included managed connection options, so checks do not depend on your computer staying online.
Which free tool should you try first?
Start with PageCrawl for a small business watchlist with team or mobile alerts, separate price and stock tracking, and saved changes to review. This guide also includes Visualping for occasional checks with AI summaries, Distill for local monitoring, ChangeTower for three daily pages, and self-hosted Changedetection.io for teams that want to run the software themselves.
Use the same few pages when comparing services. Check what each saved, whether it found the important change, and whether the alert arrived where you expected. A successful test on one page does not prove that every site will work equally well.
Start with PageCrawl Free and describe the updates you need. Keep the schedule within your allowance before adding more pages.
