What you may read, and where the line actually is
The line is not about whether information is available. It is about what the site itself permits and what the law of your jurisdiction says about automated access. Three questions settle almost every case, in this order:
- Does the site’s terms of service forbid automated access? If so, that is the end of it, whatever the page contains.
- Does robots.txt disallow the path? A posted pricing page is almost always allowed; a search endpoint or an API often is not.
- Is anything behind a login, a paywall or a click-through agreement? Then it is not material you may take, and a trial account you opened to read a price is a terms breach wearing a disguise.
Two captures, never one
A single reading of a pricing page tells you today’s number and nothing else. The unit of useful intelligence here is the pair: this page said £X on one date and £Y on another, with both captures kept.
Keep the capture, not the summary. A note saying "they raised prices in March" is worth very little six months later when somebody asks by how much and from what. A dated pair of captures answers that without anyone having to remember.
And state the change as a range unless the company announced it. The honest form is "the page said A on the 3rd and B on the 17th", not "they changed it on the 10th", which nobody observed.
The number is rarely the change
Headline prices move less often than the things around them, and the things around them matter more. Watch for these, because each one is a price rise that does not look like one:
- A limit tightened (seats, queries, projects, storage) at the same headline price.
- A capability moved up a tier, so the plan a customer is on no longer includes it.
- A tier added at the top, which usually signals where the company now thinks its money is.
- A tier removed at the bottom, which raises the entry price without changing any number on the page.
- Annual discount changed, or the annual price shown monthly instead of the monthly price.
- "Contact us" replacing a number, which is a repositioning rather than a price.
When a page refuses automated access
Sometimes the terms forbid it, or the page is behind a wall. The correct answer is to record the gap rather than route around it, and to say so wherever the finding is used.
There are legitimate alternatives for most of what you wanted: the company’s own announcements, a partner or reseller price list, a filing where the pricing is material, an analyst note, or a customer telling you what they pay. Each of those is weaker evidence than the page itself and should be attributed as what it is.
What you should not do is treat an absence as a stable price. A competitor whose pricing you cannot read is a competitor whose pricing you do not know, and a battlecard that implies otherwise will cost somebody a deal.
A cadence that survives a quarter
Weekly is enough for most markets and daily is noise: pricing pages change a handful of times a year, usually alongside a packaging change. What fails is not the frequency but the memory: the capture from eight months ago that nobody kept.
So the cadence that works is unremarkable: read on a schedule, keep every capture, compare each one against the version before it, and only raise something when the comparison shows a difference.