Stop refreshing that page

There's always one page. The listing that might come back in stock, the careers page at the company you like, the competitor's pricing, the visa rules that keep quietly changing, the status page during a bad week. You check it far more often than it changes, and you still somehow miss the change.

This is a genuinely good job for an agent, because the boring part — looking — is constant, and the interesting part — noticing — is rare.

• Checks on your schedule — every fifteen minutes if it's urgent, daily if it isn't. Server-side, whether or not you're around.
• Reads the page like a reader, not a scraper. Navigation, ads and cookie banners are stripped before it compares, so a rotated ad doesn't count as news.
• Tells you what changed — the specific lines that are different, not just “this page changed.” It keeps a snapshot server-side, so it genuinely remembers last week's version rather than guessing.
• Follows feeds properly when a site has one. Paste a blog or newsroom URL and it finds the feed behind it, then reports only entries you haven't seen — an edited post or a reshuffled front page isn't news.
• Stays quiet otherwise. A watcher that reports nothing on a quiet day is one that's working. Its window still shows you when it last looked, so silence never feels like failure.
• Pushes to your phone the moment something real happens.

Public pages only. It reads the web the way a logged-out visitor does — no signing in on your behalf, no bypassing paywalls or bot checks.

Text, not pixels. It notices wording, prices and listings changing. A redesign that shuffles layout without changing words won't register — and, deliberately, neither does a rotated advert, a render timestamp or a page whose HTML was simply reformatted.