How to See a Competitor's Pricing History

You've just started paying attention to a competitor and you want to know how their pricing got to where it is. Did they put prices up last year? Did the cheap plan used to be more generous? Was there a plan that quietly vanished? The good news is that a lot of that history is still out there, even if nobody on your team was watching at the time.

How do you find old versions of a pricing page?

1. Go to web.archive.org and paste in the full address of the pricing page, for example their /pricing page, not just the homepage.
2. You'll see a timeline and a calendar. Highlighted dates are days the archive saved a copy.
3. Open one copy from each few months across the last year or two. Keep them in separate tabs so you can flick between them.
4. Write down the plan names, the prices, and which features sit on which plan for each date. A simple table with one column per date works fine.

If the pricing page has moved over time (from /pricing to /plans, say), try the old address too. The archive saves addresses, not pages, so a renamed page has its history under its old name.

Why is the history sometimes patchy?

The archive only has a copy when its crawler happened to visit, and it visits some sites far more than others. A well-known company's pricing page might be saved several times a week. A small competitor's might have two copies in two years, or none at all.

Even when a copy exists, it isn't always readable. Many modern sites load their prices with JavaScript after the page arrives, and the archive sometimes saved the page before that happened, so you get the layout with the prices missing. A few companies also ask the archive to remove their pages. And the archive is a free public service that sometimes has outages, so if it's not loading, try again later.

How do you compare two versions without missing anything?

The headline number is the easy part. The more telling changes are usually around it:

• Plans that were added, removed or renamed.
• Features that moved from one plan to another, especially down into a cheaper plan (a competitive move) or up out of one (usually about cost or charging more).
• Both the monthly and yearly price, since some companies only change one.
• Limits like seats, projects or storage, which can change without the price moving at all.
• The currency. If one copy shows dollars and another euros, you may be looking at two regional versions of the page rather than a change.

Our pricing page checklist goes through each of these in more detail.

Can you trust a price you only saw once?

Not always. Companies test prices on some visitors, show different prices by country, and sometimes publish a change halfway. A single archived copy with an odd price might be one of those rather than a real change. If the next copy goes back to the old price, treat it as a test. There's more on spotting this in how to tell if a competitor is testing prices.

How do you keep a reliable history from now on?

The archive is great for looking back, but you can't rely on it to keep watching for you. From today, the dependable approach is to check the pricing page yourself on a schedule, keep the text of each version, and log every change with the date. Two habits make that history much more trustworthy:

• Always check from the same location, so you're not comparing one country's prices with another's.
• Only log a new price once you've seen it on two checks in a row, so a price test doesn't end up in your history as a real change.

This is what Rival Radar does for you. When you add a competitor, it looks for earlier copies of their pages in the Internet Archive, so you often start with months of history rather than none, and it tells you plainly when the archive has nothing. From then on it checks the pricing page on a schedule from the same location, reads off each plan and price, and only records a price change once it's seen it twice.

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