Hello fellow self-hosters! I am looking for an app/tool/macro/etc that can screen-scrape or API ping various merchants to track prices on specific products. Think camelcamelcamel but for any merchant. I have to believe such a tool exists and I’m not the first person to think of it.

In an ideal world, I’d like it to be able to dump the data into a spreadsheet so that I can track/graph it. But that’s not a requirement.

Does such a tool exist?

Thanks!

  • Big PEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    A tool that can track price changes on any website automatically is difficult since there isn’t a standard way that prices are presented on a website. As has already been said, changedetection is your best bet

  • PrecisePangolin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    This sounds like a dream for me, what I found was even better, was making a slick deals account and setting up an alert for exactly what I needed. That way I wasn’t mindlessly shopping and buying unnecessary things! Following this thread though cuz I’m interested!

    • macattack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Same. Slickdeals and forget it. The website is a bit of a privacy nightmare w/ inserted tracking/referral links for every deal though. I’ve stopped logging in entirely and just use it for emailed alerts.

  • Wistful@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I used browser extension Distill in the past, it’s pretty easy to use and it works well for detecting/tracking changes of the specific elements on the page. I think free version allows 25 local monitors.

    I also just found this extension Automa, I’ve never used it, but it seems cool. Looks like a Tasker for your browser. And there are also a workflows that people share, I saw this one randomly, Scrap Google Suggest to SpreadSheet so I guess you could do a similar thing for prices.

    • CosmicTurtle@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I saw the Google sheets scraping tool and that looked promising but I don’t want to have to rely on Xpath since it could change.

      Right now I’m leaning toward change detector but can’t get the reverse proxy to work.

  • palitu@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There is a Firefox adding that can load a page amd extract a div, and track it over time. But the browser needs to be open. It is called PageProbe

    I used it to track the price of an item, looking for a sale.

    edit - updated the name and added link