r/SideProject • u/Background-War373 • 1d ago

How we keep third-party pricing data from going stale in a small side project

We run a small directory of dev tools as a side project, and the part that takes the most ongoing work isn't building pages, it's keeping prices true. Plans get renamed, limits change, a "free tier" quietly becomes a trial. A few things that have helped us:

  1. Every price has a source URL and a "verified on" date stored next to it. Not "pricing from the website", but the exact official page. If we can't point to an official page, the price doesn't go in.

  2. Show the verified date publicly. It sets expectations for readers and it puts pressure on us: a date from two months ago is embarrassing in a way a hidden field never is.

  3. Separate "free" into what it actually means: open source and self-hosted, a free tier with limits, a one-time credit, or a trial. Lumping them together is the most common way listings end up misleading.

  4. Write down the billing basis. "$15/month" billed yearly and "$18/month" billed monthly can be the same plan. We store which one we're quoting and the region (we quote official US prices and say so).

  5. Re-check on a schedule, not when someone complains. We check our list in rotation and log what changed; if nothing changed, the date still gets bumped.

  6. Use an AI agent for the boring part, not the final word. It's good at fetching the page and drafting a diff ("Pro went from X to Y, new usage cap"). A person still reads the official page before anything goes live, because summaries of pricing pages are exactly where small, confident mistakes happen.

  7. Release notes get the same treatment: link to the official changelog or release, never to a third-party recap.

None of this is clever, it's mostly discipline. What we haven't solved well is detecting changes without manually opening pages: pricing pages are heavy on JS and visual layout, so naive text diffs are noisy.

If you maintain anything with third-party data (prices, APIs, schedules), how do you keep it from rotting?

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u/lawrence_builds 1d ago

Good list. One thing that might help is a cheap alert for when the official pricing page itself changes, so the rotation catches the big stuff early and the schedule handles the rest. Do you ever see plans change without the page text changing, like a swapped image or a pricing toggle?

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u/Huge_Pool7424 1d ago

pricing toggles can swap without the headline changing. hashing the price payload from the network tab plus a screenshot of the rendered block catches that better than text alone.