A website opens for you, but PageCrawl cannot check it. Relay gives PageCrawl another way to try: through your internet connection. You leave a small app running on your computer, and keep using PageCrawl to watch for changes and receive alerts.
What is PageCrawl Relay?
PageCrawl Relay is a small app that lets PageCrawl use your computer's internet connection to check public websites. Your computer provides the connection; PageCrawl does the checking, saves the results and sends alerts. You choose which monitors use Relay in PageCrawl, and keep using the same dashboard.
Connect Relay to your PageCrawl account, then choose that computer under the monitor's Location.
You do not need to leave the website open in your browser. A spare computer, compatible Raspberry Pi, NAS or Home Assistant system can do the job.
How does Relay work?
Relay creates a secure outbound connection from your computer to PageCrawl and keeps it open while the app is running. This means your computer starts the connection. PageCrawl does not connect directly to your computer from the internet.
When PageCrawl needs to check a website through Relay, it sends the request through this existing secure connection. Relay accesses the website through your internet connection and sends the website's response back to PageCrawl.
PageCrawl ↔ secure connection ↔ Relay on your computer ↔ Website
Because Relay starts the connection, you do not need to open router ports, configure port forwarding, run a public proxy server, or have a static IP address.
The website sees your connection. PageCrawl reads and compares the page, saves the results, and sends alerts according to your notification settings.
When do I actually need it?
Try Relay when a public page opens through your home internet connection but PageCrawl cannot read it, or gets different content. It is especially useful for personal price or stock alerts. If PageCrawl already reads the page correctly, you can keep using it without Relay.
For example, a shop's product page opens at home, but your PageCrawl monitor shows an error. Choose your relay for that monitor and run another check. If it now captures the product correctly, PageCrawl can watch it for you through that connection.
Relay can also help when a public website accepts only your approved internet connection, or when you want the version of a page available where you live. It does not use your browser's saved logins. Set up any required login in PageCrawl. Private intranets and local-network addresses are blocked, and a website may still refuse the check.
Relay is mainly for personal monitoring and keeping costs down. There is no PageCrawl relay fee on any plan, including Free. Your computer, electricity, internet usage and normal monitoring limits still apply.
For business monitoring, we recommend Enterprise or Ultimate with their included managed connection options. These let you monitor without depending on your own computer staying online. Relay remains available on every plan if you need your own connection.
Why not just run a proxy server at home?
Running a proxy at home is an approach our super users have used to check pages through their own connection. Relay makes that easier: it connects your computer to PageCrawl without opening a proxy port to the internet. You get the benefit of using your connection, with fewer security settings to get right.
An internet-facing proxy needs authentication and access rules. If those are misconfigured, other people may be able to send traffic through your connection. Relay connects out to PageCrawl and carries only your team's monitoring traffic.
- No port forwarding or proxy endpoint exposed to the internet.
- Relay reconnects through your current connection when your home IP changes.
- You can remove a machine's access from PageCrawl whenever you need to.
If a machine is unavailable, checks follow your selected fallback policy: use PageCrawl's locations, wait for the relay, or wait and report an offline failure.
Keep the relay token private; it authorizes that machine's connection to PageCrawl.
You can still bring your own proxies if you prefer. See Custom Proxies for Proxy Pools, which work on every plan too.
Why not just buy residential proxy bandwidth?
Relay can save you the cost of paid proxy traffic when pages work through your own connection. Our Residential Proxies and Web Unblocker offering prices optional Web Unblocker bandwidth at $10/GB. Relay has no PageCrawl bandwidth charge, so checks sent through it do not spend that paid balance.
| Web Unblocker traffic replaced by Relay | Bandwidth charge avoided |
|---|---|
| 5 GB | $50 |
| 10 GB | $100 |
For personal monitoring, this can make a useful difference to your budget, especially with larger pages or frequent checks. Relay is available on every plan, including Free. Use the cost calculator to estimate how much paid traffic your checks would otherwise need.
The Residential options included in Enterprise and Ultimate are separate: they do not spend Web Unblocker bandwidth. For business monitoring, we recommend those plans and their included managed connections. See the Residential Proxies and Web Unblocker guide for setup.
PageCrawl's locations may suit you better if you need a country your relay machine is not in, do not want checks to use your own connection, or cannot keep a computer running. You can choose a different connection for each monitor, using Relay for some pages and PageCrawl's locations for others.
Should I use Relay or self-host the whole monitor?
For personal monitoring of public pages that need your own connection, we recommend PageCrawl with Relay. Your computer only carries the traffic, while PageCrawl runs and maintains the monitoring service, reads and compares pages, stores history and sends alerts. You keep your PageCrawl workflow without operating the whole monitoring application.
Consider what you want to maintain. Self-hosting gives you control over the monitoring app and its data, along with responsibility for updates, backups, storage and troubleshooting. Relay still needs a computer running and uses your electricity and bandwidth, but PageCrawl maintains the monitoring application and stores your history. It is a useful middle ground if you want checks to use your home connection while leaving the monitoring service to us.
Paid plans include access to our support team for setup questions and monitoring issues. PageCrawl is thoroughly documented in the Help Center, available on every plan. Describe your problem to your AI assistant and share the Help Center link so it can look up the relevant guidance and help you find an answer quickly, without waiting for support.
User feedback shapes PageCrawl. We regularly implement features requested by users and use their feedback to decide what to improve next. If something is missing from your workflow, tell us what you need. You have a team that can build and maintain those improvements for you, without you having to develop and maintain your own version of a self-hosted app.
Relay does not run a browser to read pages or keep monitoring history on your device. A PageCrawl account is required, monitored content is processed and stored in PageCrawl, and normal plan limits apply.
If you need local data storage, authorized private-network access or changes to the monitoring application's code, a fully self-hosted application may fit better. Relay blocks private and local addresses.
The low-cost Relay setup tutorial explains the benefits for a small computer, then walks through installation and automatic startup.
How does it keep my network private?
PageCrawl asks your machine to reach public sites for your monitors and previews. Before connecting, the relay checks the destination and blocks local and private addresses to protect your router and other devices.
Private networks, local devices and known cloud-management addresses are blocked, including public names that resolve to those addresses. This protection does not cover every custom network configuration: a public address that your network routes to a private service may still be reachable.
For HTTPS pages, content stays encrypted between PageCrawl and the site. The relay operator can see which sites are contacted, but cannot read the encrypted page content. Plain HTTP pages have no such protection: their content and any credentials sent over HTTP can be read by the relay operator or network observers.
How do I set it up?
- Go to Settings → More → Relays and choose Add machine. Copy the token it shows, which appears once.
- For the desktop app, download and open the program on the computer you want to use. Its settings page opens in your browser.
- Paste the token and press Connect.
- On any monitor, set Location to that machine, or to Any of my machines if you run more than one.
The settings page shows connection status, data carried and the last 40 successful connections or blocked requests. These counters and recent activity reset when the program restarts. A Run a check button reports in plain language if something is wrong without interrupting active checks.
For a computer that stays on, such as a home server, a NAS or a Raspberry Pi, there are Docker, systemd and Home Assistant packages. A Home Assistant box is often the best machine for this, because it is already running all the time.
How do I install it on a Mac?
Download the Mac app, open the disk image and drag PageCrawl Relay to Applications, then open it from there. It is one app for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs and needs macOS 13 or later. The app is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a security warning.
It lives in the menu bar rather than the Dock. The menu shows whether it is connected and how much data it has carried, and has Settings, Pause relaying and Quit PageCrawl Relay. To keep it relaying whenever you are logged in, turn on Open at login on its settings page.
Can I use a low-cost Raspberry Pi?
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) is a candidate for light personal monitoring. It matches Relay's Linux ARM64 download. Reusing a compatible NAS, Home Assistant box or computer you already keep online avoids a new hardware purchase.
Use the Zero 2 W, with a 64-bit operating system. The original Zero and Zero W are 32-bit and cannot run the current ARM64 download. You also need a microSD card, a suitable power supply and a working 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi connection. Follow the service installation guide for automatic startup, and start with a few monitors before increasing traffic.
The Relay article's hardware guide covers the board price, other costs and setup links. For business monitoring, we recommend Enterprise or Ultimate and their managed connection options.
For step-by-step Linux installation, follow the low-cost Relay tutorial. It covers spare computers and used thin clients as well as compatible 64-bit Arm boards, with a complete-cost checklist for a sub-US$30 shopping budget.
What happens when my computer is off?
By default checks can use PageCrawl's own locations while the relay is unavailable. The relay becomes available for checks again when it reconnects. If a result from a different address would be wrong rather than merely different, you can tell PageCrawl to wait instead, or to flag the monitor.
The choice is made for your team, under Settings → More → Relays:
| When no machine is reachable | What happens | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Check from PageCrawl's locations (the default) | The check runs as it would without a relay | Almost everyone. A check that still happens beats no check |
| Wait until a machine is back | The check is postponed and nothing is recorded | Pages that answer our addresses with a block page or different content, where recording that would replace a good history with a wrong one |
| Wait, and mark the monitor as failed | The same, and the monitor shows Relay offline and follows your usual alert rules | Pages only your own network can reach, where the machine being off is itself the thing you want to be told about |
When a suitable relay reconnects, its postponed checks become due again. Checks are also retried periodically while waiting for a relay.
This is worth planning around either way. A laptop that sleeps relays only while it is awake, so if a page genuinely needs your connection, run the relay on something that stays on. You can also set a monthly data limit per machine, and once it is reached, checks follow the same fallback policy.
Can I see what it is doing?
Yes. The settings page lists the last 40 successful connections or blocked requests, newest first, with the reason for each refusal. Refusals show the protection against reaching your own network. The list stays in memory and resets when the program restarts.
The program is also open source, so you can read exactly what it does, build it yourself, and verify where a published binary came from. The client enforces its own destination and resource limits while trusting PageCrawl to request the intended checks. Its security documentation explains these boundaries.