[graysonk]

> What is the use case for this?

I've written something similar for a company who wanted to monitor their rival's website for news about expansion.

> Why would I pay for it?

I'm not sure either. A quick script in a cron job could also do this.

[sho]

> A quick script in a cron job could also do this

I love comments like this. You couldn't hope for a better example of "shit's easy syndrome".

Yeah, a quick script in a cron job. Oh, but now we need 2 pages monitored. Now we need 100. Now provide an interface for marketing to add and remove pages. Make sure it emails these N people (different for each page of course!). Oh, this has to be up 24/7 so we'll need a server and monitoring and a test environment and deploy strategy. Your script is giving false positives because of changing asset timestamps. Oh, your script needs to provide a visual indication of what changed and when. Etc etc etc et cetera.

That's why you pay for things like this. Because it's actually a shitload of work.

I recently used a similar site (visualping.com) to score a pair of airpods, which are in tight supply, by watching my local apple store for availability. Worked beautifully. Write my own script, are you kidding?

[Karrot_Kream]

> Yeah, a quick script in a cron job. Oh, but now we need 2 pages monitored. Now we need 100. Now provide an interface for marketing to add and remove pages. Make sure it emails these N people (different for each page of course!). Oh, this has to be up 24/7 so we'll need a server and monitoring and a test environment and deploy strategy. Your script is giving false positives because of changing asset timestamps. Oh, your script needs to provide a visual indication of what changed and when. Etc etc etc et cetera.

> I recently used a similar site (visualping.com) to score a pair of airpods, which are in tight supply, by watching my local apple store for availability. Worked beautifully. Write my own script, are you kidding?

You are totally conflating use cases. For most people, monitoring 2/3 things, a cron script works fine. In fact, I have one that's running right now and it Just Works (TM). By the time I need to provide visual diffs and have bulk email logic, I'm probably going to use an external tool (or whip it up as a side project if I think it's worth my time).

You can't equivocate the n=1 case and the n=10000 case.

[sho]

> You can't equivocate the n=1 case and the n=10000 case.

Fair enough, but the comment I was replying to was equivocating those cases too. I was simply pointing out that maybe, just maybe, a service like this might have some value above and beyond a 5 minute script and a cron job. And indulging in a small rant against the "i could do that in a script/i could write that in a weekend" etc mindset.

[jldugger]

I mean, I've written scripts like this, complete with Chef server deployment and filtering criteria. It's not surprising to see HN mention how feasible it is; we're not really the target market.

[uptown]

"I'm not sure either. A quick script in a cron job could also do this."

Except probably 99% percent of the planet couldn't tell you what a cron job is.

[koolba]

I think 99% is low balling it. Also, not all of the remainder could actually set one up either.

[olkid]

So, I am part of the 1%! Gosh, I didn't even know...

[graysonk]

I get that, but we are on hackernews right now. Presumably a larger portion of the users here know what cron is.