I can attest that, at least from the landing page, this seems to be a very good execution of the concept, especially the text-based diffing to easily spot what changed and, most importantly, how.

The biggest hurdle for such apps however are 'js-based browser-rendered sites' or whatever they're called nowadays. How does Site Spy handle such abominations?

I have wanted this for so long! My job relies on following many German laws, bureaucracy pages and the like.

In the long run I want specific changes on external pages to trigger pull requests in my code (e.g. to update a tax threshold). This requires building blocks that don't exist, and that I can't find time to code and maintain myself.

I currently use Wachete, but since over a year, it triggers rate limits on a specific website and I just can't monitor German laws anymore. No tools seem to have a debounce feature, even though I only need to check for updates once per month.

Did you solve this?

1. RSS is just fine for updates. Given the importance of your visa use-case, were you thinking of push notifications?

2. Your competition does element-level tracking. Maybe they choose XPath?

Essentially instead of having a bunch of search engines and AI spamming your site, the idea was that they would get a feed. You would essentially scan your own website.

As crawlers grew from an occasional visitor to an actual problem (an inordinate percent of all consumer traffic at the SaaS I worked for was bots rather than organic traffic, and would have been more without throttling) I keep wondering why we haven’t done this.

Google has already solved the problem of people lying about their content, because RSS feeds or user agent sniffing you can still provide false witness to your site’s content and purpose. But you’d only have to be scanned when there was something to see. And really you could play games with time delays on the feed to smear out bot traffic over the day if you wanted.

This is something that existed in the past and I used successfully, but services like this tend to disappear