Leaving Hexowatch: how to rebuild your watches as plain-English monitors

If you are looking for a Hexowatch alternative, the move itself is the part people worry about most. There is no export file to carry over, so the work is rebuilding each watch by hand. The good news is that most watches shrink to one sentence in AyeWatch, and a list of twenty pages takes an afternoon, not a week. This guide walks through the switch in order, and says which watches are better left where they are.

Step 1: write down what you watch today

Open your Hexowatch account and list every active watch with three details: the URL, the watch type, and what you actually want to hear about. That last column matters most. A visual watch on a competitor's pricing page is rarely about pixels. It is about a price going up, a plan being renamed, or a free tier disappearing. Write that intent down in your own words, because it becomes the rule.

Step 2: sort the list into three piles

Hexowatch offers many watch types: visual, content, keyword, HTML element, source code, tech stack, uptime, WHOIS, sitemap, API, RSS and backlinks. They do not all move over the same way.

The third pile is the honest part. AyeWatch reads pages and the web for meaning. It is not an uptime checker or a WHOIS tracker, and it does not pull fields into a spreadsheet.

Step 3: rebuild each page as a rule

For every watch in the first pile, create a webpage monitor in AyeWatch, paste the URL, and write the rule from your Step 1 notes. A pricing page rule might read: "Tell me when a plan price, seat limit or included feature changes. Skip cookie notices, hero images and testimonial carousels."

You can put several related URLs under one rule. If you watched five competitor pricing pages separately in Hexowatch, they can become one monitor with one rule, and each alert will name the page that changed.

Each alert arrives as a short written summary with a link to the source, so you read what happened instead of comparing two screenshots.

Step 4: turn keyword watches into topics

Keyword watches only see the pages you gave them. If the thing you care about is "a competitor raised a round" or "a new regulation on drone deliveries", it may first appear on a site you never added. AyeWatch topic monitors cover more than a billion sources, including news, blogs, forums, government pages and academic publications. You can also follow an account or community on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok and filter it with a plain-English rule.

Step 5: pick a pace and a channel

Each monitor has its own schedule. On paid plans, Auto mode speeds checks up while a topic is busy and slows them down when it goes quiet. Custom lets you set an interval yourself. A pricing page might need a close watch during a launch and a light one the rest of the year; the schedule is yours to set per monitor.

Push notifications and the in-app feed work on every plan. Paid plans add email, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the REST API, and you can send each monitor to a different place.

What it costs after the move

Hexowatch prices are from its current pricing page and catalog, checked October 2026.

When to stay on Hexowatch

Keep Hexowatch, or keep part of it, if you rely on uptime, WHOIS, tech stack or API field watches, if you need residential proxies to get past bot checks, or if you need an archive of every page version for compliance records. Those jobs sit outside what AyeWatch does.

Start with one page

Pick the watch that sends you the most useless alerts and rebuild it first. Try AyeWatch free, no card needed, and compare a week of alerts side by side. For a wider look at the options, see the AyeWatch rundown of Hexowatch alternatives.