I spend hours every week looking up competitor pricing and new product launches in the tech space. Can I build an autonomous agent that "surfs" the web, summarizes the key findings, and sends me a weekly report? What are the best tools for agents that need to bypass CAPTCHAs or deal with dynamic websites that standard scrapers can't handle?
3 answers
I built a "Competitor Tracker" agent in late 2023 using a tool called Browse.ai combined with Make.com and OpenAI. Browse.ai handles the tricky parts of dynamic websites and CAPTCHAs, then sends the raw data to an LLM to "summarize the top 3 threats." It’s incredibly powerful for a side hustle because it does the work of a junior analyst while I sleep. The best part is the "Anomaly Detection" — I told the agent to only email me if a competitor changes their pricing by more than 10%. It keeps my inbox clean and my strategy sharp.
Cynthia, that sounds like a pro-level setup. How much does the monthly API cost run for something that intensive, or do you find that the token usage is low enough to keep it under $20 a month?
You should also check out "Perplexity Pages" or their API. They have built-in web search that is much more reliable than trying to build a custom scraper from scratch.
Good shout, Ryan! Perplexity is a beast for research. Austin, if you don't want to build a complex scraper, just using their API to "search and summarize" is a great shortcut.
Kevin, because I’m only scraping 5-10 pages a week, my OpenAI bill is usually under $5. The most expensive part is the subscription to the scraping tool. But compared to the 10 hours a week it saves me, the ROI is massive. If you're doing high-volume research, you might want to look into local LLMs to save on costs, but for basic market analysis, the API is cheap.