Public data gathered on a schedule,
never faster than a source can handle
Keeping track of competitor prices, market listings or mentions in the news is useful, and doing it by hand every week is exactly the kind of task that quietly stops happening once things get busy. A scraping and research agent gathers public information on a schedule, into a structured table your team can actually use, respecting each source's rate limits and robots.txt rather than hammering it for the sake of fresher data.
The role today
Tracking a competitor’s pricing, watching for new listings in a market, or keeping an eye on where a brand gets mentioned is genuinely useful information, and also the first thing that stops happening when a team gets busy, because checking a dozen pages by hand every week competes for time against everything else that feels more urgent.
The second cost is that when this does get scripted informally, without much thought for the target site, it can hammer a source with requests far more often than the data actually changes, which risks the source blocking the request entirely and losing the tracking altogether, right when it might matter most.
The third is that raw scraped data without structure or deduplication becomes its own cleanup job. A spreadsheet of inconsistent entries, some duplicated, some missing a date, takes more time to make useful than it saved by not checking manually.
What the agent takes over
The agent gathers public information from the sources your team specifies, competitor prices, marketplace listings, news mentions, industry directories, on a schedule that matches how often the data actually changes, not faster. It respects each source’s robots.txt and rate limits, checked against that source’s terms of service before anything gets built, and outputs into a clean, structured table with the source and timestamp on every row.
It deduplicates against prior runs, so the table stays a clean trend line rather than an accumulating pile of repeated entries, and alerts your team if a source becomes unreachable or changes its layout rather than silently returning stale or broken data.
Typical scope: public, non-authenticated pages where gathering the information does not require bypassing any protection the source has put in place. We decline sources whose terms explicitly prohibit this kind of access.
What stays with humans
Deciding what to do with the findings, a price move, a new competitor listing, is a business decision your team makes. Any legal or terms-of-service judgment call on a borderline source is reviewed with you before we build anything against it, not decided unilaterally.
Guards
Only public data is gathered, and only from sources whose terms of service and robots.txt allow it. Rate limits are set to respect the source, never to extract data faster than the source can comfortably serve. Every row is logged with its source and timestamp for traceability, and a blocked or changed source triggers an alert rather than a workaround attempt.
Price and timeline
| Option | Price | What it covers | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency runs it | from $1,500 + support plan | Agent built and run by us, monthly source health check | 1 to 2 weeks |
| Full control, handover-ready | from $2,500 | Same agent on your own infrastructure, documented sources, your team runs it | 2 to 3 weeks |
Running cost is usually $10 to $40 a month in model and hosting usage, depending on source count and frequency.
Related
See the analytics service page and AI agents service page for the surrounding build. Within this group: browser automation agent and data quality agent cover adjacent ground. For related one-time setups, see automate competitor monitoring and automate price monitoring. Real monitoring discipline behind this page: the two-brand analytics hub case study, where competitor and distributor monitoring caught 184 of 218 real price-undercut events with zero false alarms.
Checking competitor prices by hand, when you remember to? Get in touch and we will look at what sources matter most first.
FAQ
How much does a scraping and research agent cost?
From $1,500 for a handful of sources on a weekly schedule, live in 1 to 2 weeks. A larger set of sources or a daily schedule usually runs $2,200 to $3,500.
How long before it is delivering real data?
1 to 2 weeks: building and testing against each source takes most of it, since every site is structured slightly differently and needs its own careful handling.
Which sources can it track?
Public pages: competitor pricing, marketplace listings, news mentions, industry directories. We check each source's terms of service and robots.txt before building anything against it, and skip sources that explicitly prohibit it.
What if a source changes its layout or blocks the agent?
It alerts your team rather than trying to work around a block, since bypassing a source's own protections is explicitly outside what we build. A layout change gets the script updated once confirmed.
Where does the data end up, and who can access it?
A structured table or sheet your team controls, with the source and timestamp on every row so the data is traceable. It stays on your infrastructure or accounts, not ours.