Free tool · Competitor monitoring

Competitor Monitoring Alert Builder

You can monitor competitors for free by combining Google News RSS for announcements, Reddit and Hacker News search feeds for user chatter, and a weekly manual check of their pricing page and changelog. Enter your competitors below to generate all of it, plus one OPML file that imports the whole stack into any RSS reader.

Free, no account required.

One per line as Name | domain.com, up to 8. The domain is optional but unlocks their own feed and pricing page.

Signals to watch

Add at least one competitor and one signal.

Your monitoring stack will appear here: alert queries to paste into Google Alerts, working RSS feeds, review-site watch links, and a one-file OPML import for your reader.

What each source covers, and what it costs you

Three of these are real feeds you can automate today. Four require a human. Any tool that tells you otherwise is generating links that quietly do not work.

SourceStatusWhat it gives you
Google News RSSWorking feedPress, funding, launches. Fast and reliable, but only covers what got written about.
Reddit search RSSWorking feedUnfiltered user reaction, complaints, and switching talk. The earliest churn signal you get.
Hacker News RSSWorking feedDeveloper sentiment and launch discussion. High signal for technical products.
Google AlertsManual pasteEmail delivery for the same queries. No API or link-based creation exists.
Their own blog or changelogCandidate URLCannot be discovered without fetching their site. Verify once, then it is the highest-value feed you have.
Review sitesManual checkNo usable public feeds. Check monthly, filtered to one and two stars, sorted by newest.
Pricing pageManual checkThe change that matters most and the one that never generates a notification.

Where a free monitoring stack breaks down

The stack this tool builds works. The problem is not coverage, it is volume. Eight competitors across five signals produces dozens of items a day, most of them the same announcement syndicated across six outlets.

After about three weeks, the reader has 400 unread items and everyone stops opening it. Nothing failed technically. The signal is all still there, and nobody is reading it.

The other gap is judgment. A feed tells you a competitor shipped something. It does not tell you whether that thing threatens a deal you are in, or which of your reps needs to know before Thursday.

That is the difference between monitoring and intelligence: deduping, grading, and tying each move to your own product. If you want that without the daily reading, Compete does it as one graded brief per competitor per week.

Next: turn what you find into something reps can use with the Battlecard Generator, and dig into a specific competitor with the Complaint Finder.

How to set up free competitor monitoring

Step 1

List your competitors with domains

Enter up to eight as Name | domain.com. The domain is optional but it unlocks their pricing page, changelog search, and candidate feed URLs for their own blog.

Step 2

Pick the signals that actually change your behavior

Launches, pricing, funding, hiring, and complaints. Turn off anything you would not act on. A feed nobody reads is worse than no feed, because it teaches you to ignore the reader.

Step 3

Import the OPML file into your reader

Download the OPML and import it into Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, or anything that accepts OPML. Every Google News, Reddit, and Hacker News feed goes live at once, organized by competitor.

Step 4

Paste the alert queries into Google Alerts

If you also want email alerts, copy each query into Google Alerts manually. Google provides no way to prefill an alert from a link, so this step cannot be automated by any tool that tells you the truth.

When you outgrow this tool

A stack of free alerts produces noise. Compete dedupes it, grades it, and hands you one brief per competitor per week.

This tool is free and complete on its own, with no account and no limits worth mentioning. Linkeddit is what you use when the job stops being a one-off and starts needing to run every week without you.

FAQ

Competitor Monitoring Alert Builder questions

What free monitoring covers, what it structurally cannot cover, and how much time it takes to keep.

How do I monitor competitors for free?

Combine three free sources: Google News RSS for press and announcements, Reddit and Hacker News search feeds for unfiltered user chatter, and a manual weekly check of their pricing page and changelog. This tool generates all of it, including a single OPML file you can import into any RSS reader.

Can I prefill a Google Alert with a link?

No. Google Alerts has no supported URL parameter for creating an alert with a query, so any tool claiming a one-click Google Alerts setup is either using something undocumented or quietly not working. This builder gives you the exact query string to paste, which takes about ten seconds per alert.

What is OPML and why does it matter here?

OPML is a plain XML format for exchanging lists of RSS feeds, supported by essentially every reader. It matters because subscribing to twenty feeds by hand is the step where people abandon this setup. One file import turns twenty minutes of clicking into about thirty seconds.

Why are some feed URLs marked as candidates?

A competitor's own blog or changelog feed cannot be discovered without fetching their site, which this browser-only tool does not do. So it constructs URLs from common feed paths and labels them honestly. Open each one once to confirm it resolves; unverified candidates are deliberately excluded from the OPML file.

What do free alerts miss?

Silent changes, which are usually the important ones. A competitor quietly editing a pricing page, removing a plan, or changing seat minimums generates no press release and no RSS item. That is why the cadence checklist keeps a manual weekly pricing-page check even after the feeds are live.

How much time does this take to maintain?

About five minutes a day skimming the reader, thirty minutes a week on manual pricing and changelog checks, and an hour a month reading new negative reviews and updating battlecards. If nobody owns that time, the stack decays into noise within a month.

Is this alert builder free?

Yes, with no account and no limits, and nothing you type leaves your browser. Deduping the resulting noise, grading which moves matter, and delivering one brief per competitor per week is what the paid Compete feature does.