We’ve been quiet about this for a while
Back at the last few months of this newsletter, I wrote about AI, small teams, Second Brain, my book, scraping. Almost nothing about website monitoring, the thing many of you signed up for in the first place.
There was a reason. We were rebuilding something new from scratch, and I didn’t want to write about it until I could send you a link and say “go try it.”
Today is the day. OR:ON is live.
From “something changed” to “this changed to that”
Let’s be honest about Hexowatch, for five years it mostly told you one thing: something on this page changed. Then you opened two screenshots and tried to find it yourself. Sometimes it was a price. Often it was a banner that moved, or worst - just half-loaded page.
OR:ON finds it for you and tells you in plain words. Your competitor drops a price, and the alert says “Pro plan price changed from $49 to $39.” A new role shows up on a job board, and you get “New job posted: Senior Product Marketing Manager, Miami.”
You’ll see the before and after next to each other if you want to double check. And OR:ON only writes about the part you asked it to watch. If a popup appears somewhere else on the page, you won’t hear about it.
Ask your favorite AI about it
Every change OR:ON finds is saved. That history turned out to be more useful than we expected.
If you use Claude or ChatGPT, you can connect OR:ON to it and just ask. Something like “What did my competitors change on their pricing this quarter?” Your AI answers from your actual Watches, not from guesses. I use this more than I thought I would.
You can also ask right inside OR:ON. Every answer links to the changes it’s based on, so you can check it yourself.
A normal Tuesday
Your competitor lowers the price on its Pro plan early in the morning. No email, no post on LinkedIn, they just change the number.
Most of the time you’d learn about it weeks later, usually from a customer on a renewal call. Not a fun way to find out.
With OR:ON watching that page, the alert is waiting when you open your email. By lunch you know about the price and you’ve had time to decide if you care.
Setup is one sentence
Paste a link. OR:ON opens the page and shows it to you. Then type what you care about: “Tell me when the price drops below $500.” Or just click the price on the page.
That’s the setup. OR:ON reads the page, works out what you meant and builds the check. On pages it hasn’t seen before, it suggests what’s worth watching.
The pages that don’t want to be watched
Some sites put up a fight. They block automated visitors, hide content behind cookie banners and load differently every time. Hexowatch hit those walls often.
OR:ON gets through. Its success rate at opening pages is more than 10 times higher than Hexowatch’s. It visits pages through residential proxies in the country you choose and closes cookie banners before it looks at anything.
Those sites get smarter. So do we. :)
Why it took us this long
For more than five years we read your support tickets, your feature requests and, yes, your bad reviews. Most of them came down to one wish: just tell me what changed.
A few years ago, we couldn’t build that. A machine looking at a web page saw only code and pixels. It couldn’t tell a price from a phone number or a job post from a footer.
Today’s AI reads a page much like you do. It sees a price as a price. That shift, plus years of your feedback telling us exactly what to fix, is what made OR:ON possible. So we went quiet and built it.
What will you watch first?
Start with a page you already check by hand. A few ideas:
A competitor’s pricing page. Tell OR:ON to let you know if any plan price changes.
A product that keeps selling out. Ask it to tell you when it’s back in stock.
A careers page. Useful if you’re hiring, job hunting or just curious who a competitor is hiring.
Terms and refund policies. Yours or someone else’s.
Tenders and grants. They show up with no warning and short deadlines.
An RSS feed. Point it at a competitor’s blog and hear about every new post without subscribing.
A sitemap. You’ll see new pages the day they go live, often before they’re linked anywhere.
This is day one. Pages behind a login aren’t supported yet, and the list of what’s coming next is long. Most of it came from you.
Your first Watch takes a minute
Think of one page you still check by hand. Open orion.hexowatch.com, paste the link and tell OR:ON in one sentence what matters. Then close the tab and get on with your day.
The Free plan needs no card, and you sign in with your existing Hexact account.
We’ve been quiet about monitoring for a long time.
