Track competitor pricing changes with Perplexity (a monthly routine, not a dashboard)

Pricing is the fastest-moving signal in most markets and the worst-served by tools: enterprise sites bury changes in PDFs, regional pages differ, and pricing-scraping services cost more than the insight is worth to a small company. The routine I've settled on takes twenty minutes a month with Perplexity and catches most of what matters.

The setup: one saved thread structure, four prompts, one per question type. First — 'summarize the current public pricing for [competitor] for [plan tier], including recent changes if announced.' Second, the one that earns its keep: search for the competitor's name plus 'pricing' with a recency filter, which surfaces launch posts, comparison-site updates and user complaints about new fees before the official page reflects them.

Third prompt is the honest one: 'what do customers say changed?' Reddit and review sites are where pricing changes actually surface first — the annual-to-monthly conversion squeeze, the new per-seat minimum, the feature moved to a higher tier. Official pages document the present; the complaints describe the delta.

Fourth, close the loop on yourself: 'compare this to my summary from last month' — paste your own notes, ask for the diff. The comparison is where the signal lives. A single month's snapshot is trivia; four months of deltas is a strategy meeting.

What this routine won't do: catch anything behind a sales call, which is exactly where the biggest accounts get their real pricing. And it requires the discipline of actually scheduling the twenty minutes — my first attempt died because I never booked it. Calendar invite titled 'competitor pricing,' first Tuesday, done. The tool is the easy half; the routine is the product.