It’s 7:30 AM. I open five browser tabs:

1. Our main competitor’s blog (did they ship anything?)
2. Their changelog/updates page (new features?)
3. Hacker News (are we mentioned? Are they?)
4. ProductHunt (who’s launching today?)
5. Our error monitoring dashboard (everything green?)

This takes exactly 5 minutes. I’ve done it every single morning since we launched.

That’s 30 hours per year spent hitting refresh.

The Obvious Question Nobody Asks

“Why don’t you just automate it?”

Great question. I tried:

Zapier: $299/month for web scraping. That’s $119 per hour saved.

Python Script: Worked for 3 weeks until the site changed. Never fixed it.

Upwork: $150 for a script that broke within a month.

Why Manual Checking Persists

Here’s what I realized: The problem isn’t technical complexity. It’s context.

When I manually check:

• I spot subtle shifts in messaging
• I notice new team members in their About page
• I catch feature announcements buried in blog posts
• I see patterns humans notice but rules miss

When I automate with existing tools:

• “Alert if page changes” floods me with noise
• “Check for keyword” misses the important stuff
• The tool can’t understand what actually matters
• I still check manually to catch what it missed

The 80/20 Reality

80% of what we check daily is simple:

• “Did they publish a new blog post?”
• “Any new features in their changelog?”
• “Are people talking about us?”

But that last 20% is why we don’t automate:

• “They pivoted positioning but kept the same features”
• “New VP of Engineering joined (means they’re scaling)”
• “Support complaints increasing on Twitter”

Current tools force us to handle 100% of cases upfront. So we handle 0% and keep checking manually.

A Different Approach

We took a different path building our solution:

Instead of defining rules upfront, we asked: “What do you check every morning?”

Using AI agents that:

• Learn patterns from what matters
• Adapt when websites change
• Send summaries, not raw data
• Handle the 80% reliably

The nuanced 20% still needs human judgment. But getting 80% of your mornings back changes everything.

The Real Cost

My 5 minutes every morning:

• Time: 30 hours/year
• Missed changes: Weekends, holidays
• Mental tax: The constant “should I check?” feeling

Total setup cost for automation: $150 + $69/month + maintenance.

Or just keep checking manually.

The Solution Pattern

The breakthrough came when we stopped trying to automate everything perfectly. Instead:

1. Describe what you check in plain English
2. Let AI figure out how to check it
3. Get summaries when things actually change
4. No maintenance, no breaking scripts

I still manually check our competitors sometimes. Old habits die hard. But now it’s once a week, not every morning. And I actually enjoy it.