Your monitoring setup catches downtime. It doesn't catch the competitor who quietly dropped their price by 15%, the supplier whose inventory hit zero three days ago, or the regulatory page that updated its requirements last Tuesday.
Uptime monitoring and content monitoring are different problems. The first is solved. The second — monitoring what's on pages at scale, across authenticated portals, with structured output — is still largely manual or brittle.
At 10 sites, a cron job and a headless browser works fine. At 100, it starts to creak. At 1,000, you're managing a fleet of browser processes, rotating proxies, handling session state, and debugging access failures — before you've written a single line of business logic.
TinyFish's agent API is built around a different model: describe what to check, run it in parallel, get structured JSON back. Here's how to build a monitoring pipeline that scales to 1,000 sites without managing the infrastructure.
Standard monitoring tools — Uptime Robot, Pingdom, Better Uptime — check whether a URL returns a 200. That's useful for availability. It tells you nothing about:
For these use cases, you need a monitor that reads and understands the page, not just pings it.
TinyFish's Web Agent API accepts a natural language goal and returns structured JSON. For monitoring, the pattern is:
With 50 concurrent agents on the Pro plan, you can check 50 sites simultaneously. For 1,000 sites, that's 20 sequential batches — total runtime depends on per-site task complexity, typically 30 seconds to 3 minutes per batch.
All API calls use an API key from your TinyFish dashboard, passed via the X-API-Key header:
Before batching, test your goal description against one site:
With asyncio and aiohttp, run up to 50 concurrent requests matching your plan's concurrency limit:
For sites that require login, include credentials in your goal description. TinyFish agents handle authentication as part of the task:
The safety instruction (Do not proceed to any checkout or payment flow) matters for any commercial workflow — it prevents the agent from accidentally triggering transactions.
Not all sites need the same cadence. Group by volatility:
Cost depends on how many steps each monitoring task takes:
Search and Fetch are free on all plans — rate-limited by plan tier (Free: 5 searches/min, 25 fetches/min). Failed fetches are never charged. Failed fetches are never charged. TinyFish runs its own browser infrastructure so there's no markup to pass on; failed fetches don't count against your quota either. Credits apply only to agent steps and browser sessions, as shown:
Pro plan (50 concurrent, $150/month, 16,500 steps included) covers ~3,300 simple site checks before overage. Beyond that, steps bill at $0.012.
To reduce cost: keep goal descriptions narrow. "Find the price of the main product" uses fewer steps than "Find all pricing including discounts, bulk tiers, and promotions."
Sites with strict automation requirements. Sites with strict automation requirements work with TinyFish's infrastructure-level handling — no managing puppeteer-extra plugins or proxy rotation per site.
Layout changes. When a competitor redesigns their pricing page and your CSS selectors break, the agent reads the page and finds the price regardless of class names. No code update needed.
Authenticated portals at scale. Running 50 simultaneous authenticated sessions across different supplier portals would require significant session management infrastructure. With TinyFish, it's 50 API calls with different credentials in the goal.
Structured output. Instead of HTML to parse, you get JSON with the fields you requested. No BeautifulSoup, no regex, no post-processing pipeline.
TinyFish gives you 500 free steps to test against your actual monitoring targets — no credit card required.
Up to your plan's concurrent agent limit: 2 on PAYG, 10 on Starter, 50 on Pro. For 1,000 sites on Pro, you run 20 sequential batches of 50. Runtime per batch depends on task complexity — simple checks: 10–30 seconds each; authenticated multi-step tasks: 1–3 minutes.
TinyFish runs a native Chromium-based browser session with infrastructure-level request handling. Residential proxy routing is included on all plans at no extra cost. Success rates vary by site complexity; enterprise-grade protection systems may need additional configuration.
Yes. Include credentials in your goal description; the agent handles the authentication flow. Store credentials as environment variables, not in the goal string directly. Always add a safety instruction ("Do not proceed to checkout") for any commercial workflow.
Nothing breaks on your end. The agent reads the page and extracts the data based on your goal description, not CSS selectors. Layout changes are invisible to your monitoring pipeline.
Pipe the changes list from the diff function to your alerting stack — Slack via webhook, PagerDuty, email, or any webhook endpoint. TinyFish returns JSON; routing it to alerts is standard integration work.
At small scale (under 100 sites/day), self-managed Playwright on cheap compute is cheaper. At 100–1,000 sites/day, TinyFish's all-in pricing — browsers, proxies, LLM inference included — often undercuts the real cost of managing the infrastructure, especially accounting for engineering time on proxy rotation, anti-detection, and session management.
500 free steps, no credit card. The fastest way to test whether TinyFish fits your workflow.
No credit card. No setup. Run your first operation in under a minute.
