IFTTT website monitoring: moving your watch applets to AyeWatch

A lot of people do their first bit of IFTTT website monitoring with an applet like "if a new item appears in this feed, send me an email". It works until one of three things happens: the page you care about has no feed, the keyword trigger forwards every post that happens to contain the word, or the free plan's two Applets are already taken by your smart lights. This guide shows how to move those watching jobs into AyeWatch, one applet at a time, and leave IFTTT to do the jobs it is good at.

Step 1: sort your applets into two piles

Open your IFTTT account and list what each applet does. Most fall into one of two groups:

• Watching applets. Anything that starts with "New feed item", "New feed item matches", or a similar trigger whose only purpose is to tell you something new appeared on the web.
• Glue applets. Anything that moves data between your own devices and apps: turn on a lamp at sunset, save a photo to a cloud drive, log a calendar event.

Only the first pile moves. AyeWatch does not control devices, calendars or consumer apps, so the second pile stays where it is.

Step 2: turn each watching applet into a monitor

AyeWatch has three kinds of monitor, and each watching applet maps onto one of them.

A feed you followed for a topic. Create an Internet monitor and write the topic as a sentence. Instead of "new item matches: funding", write "A new funding round, office opening or leadership change at any of these three competitors." AyeWatch reads new items by meaning, so a post that only mentions the word in passing does not produce an alert.

A page you wanted to watch but could not, because it has no feed. Create a Webpages monitor and paste the URL. Pricing pages, job boards, regulatory notices and product pages all work. You get an alert when the content changes in a way that matters, with a short summary of what changed.

A social account or community. AyeWatch can watch X profiles and searches, subreddits, YouTube channels, LinkedIn company posts, Instagram hashtags and TikTok profiles. Add a filter in plain English, such as "only posts announcing a new product or a price change", and the rest is skipped.

There is nothing to export. You rebuild each one by describing it, which usually takes less time than it took to set up the applet.

Step 3: pick a speed for each monitor

On IFTTT, the RSS trigger polls once an hour on the free plan and every five minutes on Pro and Pro+. On AyeWatch each monitor has its own pace. Auto mode, on paid plans, checks more often while a topic is busy and backs off when it is quiet. Custom lets you pick an interval yourself when you know how urgent a topic is.

The bigger difference is what happens after a check. IFTTT passes along any item that contains your keyword. AyeWatch reads the new item against your plain-English rule, decides whether it matters to you, and sends a short summary with the source, so a quiet week stays quiet.

Step 4: choose where alerts land

Every plan gets the AyeWatch feed and push notifications in the iOS and Android apps. Paid plans add email, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the REST API, and you pick channels per monitor. If one of your old applets did something after the alert, like adding a row to a sheet, point an AyeWatch webhook at that step. The webhooks are signed with HMAC-SHA256, so your receiving code can check they really came from AyeWatch. You can even send the webhook into IFTTT and keep the rest of the chain intact.

Step 5: switch off the old applets

Run both side by side for a few days. When the monitor has caught what the applet would have caught, and skipped what you did not want, turn the applet off. That frees an Applet slot on the free plan for something else.

What it costs

AyeWatch starts with a Free Preview: three lifetime monitoring runs across up to three topics, daily or slower, with no card. The runs do not renew, so it is a trial, not a free tier. Paid plans start at $9 a month, with no contract or cancellation fee. IFTTT Pro is $2.99 a month and Pro+ is $8.99 a month, both billed annually.

When to leave things on IFTTT

If an applet's job is to connect your home or your consumer apps, IFTTT is cheap, simple and the right tool. Keep it for that. For the alerts themselves, a monitor that reads by meaning is the better fit. The full IFTTT comparison has the feature table if you want it side by side.