What is a price scraper?
A price scraper is a tool or workflow that visits product pages and turns the prices they display into structured data. A useful price scraper keeps more than the number: product, active variant, currency, seller or offer context, source URL, check time, and access status belong in the same row. With ego(lite), your own AI agent does that work in visible browser Spaces and returns a CSV or Markdown snapshot you can audit.
How do I price scrape e-commerce websites with ego(lite)?
Install ego(lite), give Codex or Claude Code a bounded list of product URLs, name the fields you need, and set clear stop rules. The agent opens each store or URL group in its own visible Space, records only what the current page displays, and returns a report with the price, currency, variant, source URL, checked-at time, and status. When a site needs a human decision, the agent stops and lets you inspect or take over.
What data can a price scraper tool collect?
From the pages you provide, the agent can record visible product titles, IDs or SKUs, selected variants, selling and list prices, currency, discount or coupon labels, member or subscription prices, seller, stock text, and shipping or delivery text. It keeps each value exactly as displayed and marks anything absent as not displayed. It does not infer inventory, margins, sales volume, negotiated prices, or other hidden data.
How does web scraping work for price monitoring?
Price monitoring compares snapshots from different times. Run the same URL manifest with the same field contract, then compare the displayed_price and checked_at columns between reports. ego(lite) makes those snapshots visible and source-linked, but it is not an always-on monitoring SaaS: it does not schedule itself in the cloud, send automatic price alerts, or reconstruct price history from before your first run.
What is the cost of a price scraper?
The cost depends on the model. Current tools commonly charge a monthly subscription, per request, per record, or for proxy and JavaScript-rendering usage; building your own also costs engineering and maintenance time. ego(lite) is free to download for Mac and adds no per-row scraping fee. You use your own coding agent, which may have its own token or subscription cost, and the workflow is designed for bounded research rather than high-volume production monitoring.
Is ego(lite) a free price scraper?
ego(lite) is free to download for Mac, with no scraping credits or per-record charge. The agent doing the work is your own Codex, Claude Code, or compatible coding agent, so its normal usage costs still apply. The trade-off is deliberate: this is a visible, supervised workflow for bounded URL lists, not a hosted service that promises millions of records or continuous monitoring.
How is this different from price monitoring software or a scraper API?
Price monitoring software usually provides scheduled crawls, dashboards, alerts, and integrations for an ongoing subscription. Scraper APIs provide rendered pages or structured records through metered requests and often sell proxy rotation. ego(lite) uses the coding agent you already have in a visible browser on your Mac. It is strongest when you want a bounded, reviewable price snapshot with source URLs and page context, not an unattended production data feed.
Why does a scraped price differ from the price I see?
Stores can vary prices by selected size or color, pack quantity, seller, account or membership state, delivery location, currency, promotion, and time. Some pages also separate list price, sale price, coupon, subscription price, shipping, and tax. That is why this workflow records the active variant, labeled price type, currency, relevant page context, source URL, and checked-at time instead of reducing the page to one unexplained number.
Can I schedule automatic price monitoring with ego(lite)?
This page does not promise unattended scheduling or alerts. You can keep the URL manifest and rerun it when you need a new snapshot, then compare reports by source and checked-at time. If you need hourly cloud jobs, alerting, API delivery, service-level guarantees, or thousands of products every day, use an official commerce API or a dedicated price-monitoring provider built for that operating model.
Is price scraping legal?
There is no universal answer. Public visibility, copyright, database rights, privacy law, contract terms, robots policies, rate limits, jurisdiction, and how you use the data can all matter. Review each website's current terms and technical rules, use official APIs when available, keep collections bounded, and do not bypass access controls. This workflow's conservative behavior does not create permission, and this page is not legal advice.
What happens when a store blocks the price scrape?
The agent stops in that Space and records the source URL, check time, and visible restriction instead of solving or bypassing it. You can inspect the page, take over if the store asks for an appropriate human action, or end that source. The blocked row stays in the report so a partial result is never mistaken for a complete price comparison.
How do I scrape prices from JavaScript-rendered pages?
Use a real browser that waits for the visible product state, not an HTML request that stops at the initial shell. Ask the agent to confirm the product title, active variant, and displayed price after the page finishes rendering, and to record a status when the content never appears. It may inspect permitted in-page JSON or network evidence to explain a value, but the report should stay anchored to what the authorized page visibly displays.
Can I compare prices across countries or regions?
You can compare separate, authorized page snapshots when each source explicitly records its marketplace domain, currency, delivery location, seller, and checked-at time. Do not use the workflow to fake a region, rotate identities, or change an account's location to manufacture offers you are not allowed to view. Normalize currencies only in a downstream, documented step; keep the original displayed amount beside the converted value.
Can ego(lite) send automatic price-drop alerts?
Not as a built-in always-on service. Rerun the same bounded manifest, compare the displayed_price and checked_at columns, and pass the resulting CSV to a permissioned alert workflow if you need notifications. For hourly monitoring, dashboards, webhooks, or service-level guarantees, use a dedicated provider or official commerce API; keep the original snapshot so an alert can be traced to a page.
How should scraped price data be normalized?
Normalize only after preserving the source fields. Keep the raw displayed amount and currency, then add a separate normalized numeric value with an exchange-rate timestamp, unit or pack-size rule, and any tax or shipping decision. Never merge sale, member, subscription, coupon, or list prices into one unlabeled column, and flag rows whose variant or currency cannot be compared safely.
What can I use a price-scraping snapshot for?
A source-linked snapshot is useful for manual competitor research, assortment checks, a documented purchase review, or a small internal comparison where a person can inspect the source. It is not a license to republish protected catalog content, make unattended repricing decisions, or infer hidden inventory and margins. Match the use to each site's terms, privacy obligations, and the evidence actually present in the report.