A Wachete alternative: moving your watches to plain-English rules

If you are looking for a Wachete alternative, the hard part is rarely signing up somewhere new. It is rebuilding the watches you already have, each with its selected section, its "notify when this text appears" condition and its check interval. This guide walks through that move into AyeWatch, one watch type at a time, and points out the few cases where you should leave a watch where it is.

Before you start: list what each watch is for

Open your Wachete dashboard and write one line per monitor saying what you actually want to hear about. Not "the div with the price table", but "tell me when the Pro plan price changes" or "tell me when a new role in Berlin is posted". Those lines become your AyeWatch rules almost word for word.

While you are there, sort the list into four groups:

1. Plain pages where you watch a section for text changes.
2. Pages where you watch a number, such as a price, against a threshold.
3. Pages behind a login, files such as PDFs, or uptime checks.
4. Watches you set up years ago and no longer read.

Group four is the easiest. Delete it.

Step 1: rebuild section and text watches as page monitors

In AyeWatch, create a webpage monitor and paste the URL. Instead of selecting an area of the page, write the rule you drafted above in plain English. A few examples:

• A supplier's terms page: "Alert when payment terms, delivery times or liability wording change. Ignore footer and cookie text."
• A grant portal: "Tell me when a new call opens or a deadline moves."
• A rival's changelog: "Alert on new features or retired features, not wording fixes."

AyeWatch judges each change against that rule and sends a short summary when one matches. Because the rule describes meaning rather than a spot on the page, a redesign that moves the content around does not break it. If several pages belong to the same question, such as a competitor's pricing, changelog and careers pages, put them in one monitor under one rule.

Step 2: turn keyword watches into topic monitors

Many Wachete users watch a page only to catch a word, a product name or a person's name showing up. That works for pages you already know about. It misses the same news when it lands somewhere else.

AyeWatch has topic monitors that search across more than a billion sources, including news sites, forums, blogs, government pages and academic publications, plus monitors for X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Describe the topic, for example "new regulations on short-term rentals in Lisbon", and you no longer have to guess which page will carry it first.

Step 3: handle number watches with a clear rule

Wachete is good at numbers: it can alert when a value crosses a threshold and chart it over time. In AyeWatch you write the condition as a sentence, such as "Alert if the listed price of the 2 TB model drops below 150 euros." You get the alert with a summary, but not a five-year chart or a spreadsheet export. If the chart is the point, keep that watch in Wachete.

Step 4: pick check speed and delivery

Auto mode adjusts the check frequency for you, so a page that changes often is checked more and a quiet one less. If you prefer, pick an interval per monitor yourself: a stock page might need frequent checks, while a policy page rarely needs more than daily.

Push notifications and the in-app feed come with every plan. Email alerts, the daily digest email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the REST API need a paid plan. You can send different monitors to different places, for example pricing alerts to a sales channel and policy alerts to your own phone.

What to keep in Wachete

Be honest with group three from your list. Wachete handles pages that need a username and password (from its Standard plan), reads text inside PDF, Word and Excel files, checks uptime and certificate expiry, and keeps up to 12 months of saved values. AyeWatch does not list those features. If a watch depends on one of them, keep it in Wachete, which costs from $5.40 a month, and move the rest.

A quick checklist

You can try the move without a card: AyeWatch's Free Preview gives three lifetime monitoring runs across up to three topics. That is enough to rebuild your noisiest watch and compare the alerts side by side before you pick a plan.