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!
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
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.
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.