Build a Multi‑Site Competitor Price Monitor in 10 Minutes (No Selectors, No Selenium)

Description and use

Build a multi‑site competitor price monitor in 10 minutes using Scraping AI, Slack alerts, and free GitHub Actions scheduling.

Problem

Custom scrapers for each e‑commerce site are fragile, requiring constant selector maintenance and complex parsing for price formats.

Outcome

Monitors 50 products across 3 retailers daily for ~$6.60/month, zero‑cost cron via GitHub Actions, and real‑time Slack alerts for price drops.

Workflow

• 1. Install Scraping AI SDK: pip install scraping‑ai
• 2. Create SQLite DB for price history
• 3. Define monitor_url function that calls Scraping AI with a schema
• 4. Compare current price to last stored price
• 5. If price dropped, format alert and POST to Slack webhook
• 6. Log new price to database
• 7. Schedule script on GitHub Actions cron

Evidence

Use Scraping AI to extract normalized numeric pricing and stock status with a single API call.

Source

Zero‑Cost Cron: Runs automatically on free GitHub Actions compute.

Source