Distill

What Distill does

Distill watches web pages and alerts you when they change. A monitor is one page or URL. Monitors can run locally in the browser extension or desktop app, or on Distill's cloud servers. It suits someone who knows which pages to watch, such as a competitor's pricing or product page.

How the plans are counted

Each plan sets the number of monitors, the cloud checks per month and the shortest cloud interval. Free gives 25 monitors (5 in the cloud), 1,000 cloud checks a month and a 6-hour minimum. Starter gives 50 monitors, 30,000 checks and 10 minutes; Professional 150 monitors, 100,000 checks and 5 minutes; Flexi 500+ monitors, 200,000+ checks and 2 minutes. Local monitors can run as often as every 5 seconds, and browser-extension checks are unlimited.

Cloud checks are counted in 10-second units, so a check that takes 15 seconds counts as two, and each solved reCAPTCHA v2 adds 24 checks. Unused checks expire at the end of the billing period. As a sizing example, 50 pages checked hourly in the cloud use 50 × 24 × 30 = 36,000 checks in a 30-day month, more than the 30,000 on Starter.

What you pay

Starter costs USD 15 a month, or USD 12 a month on annual billing (USD 144 a year, 12 × 12). Professional costs USD 35 a month, or USD 28 a month annually (USD 336 a year). Flexi starts at USD 80 a month and bills usage beyond its included amounts at the end of the period: 4,000 extra cloud checks or 20 extra monitors per USD 1, 10 SMS per USD 1 and USD 15 per extra device. You can cancel at any time by moving to the free plan. Taxes are not stated.

Alerts, history and teams

Free allows 30 email or webhook alerts a month (email only) and no SMS. Starter allows 2,000 email and webhook alerts and 100 SMS; Professional unlimited email alerts and 250 SMS. Emails sent by browser-extension monitors count too. Version history keeps 10 changes per monitor on Starter and 20 on Professional and Flexi; Free has none.

Starter and Professional are described as plans for individual use. For a shared team watchlist and central billing, Distill points to Enterprise, which has no published price and lists multiple user accounts, API access on request, webhooks and JSON or CSV import and export of monitors.

What the documentation leaves open

With Annual selected, Flexi still shows USD 80+ a month, so its annual price is not clear from the pricing page. The page does not say whether annual plans are charged upfront, how many users the individual plans allow or how long version history is kept.

When to compare alternatives

Visualping's Personal 5K also costs USD 35 a month, with 5,000 checks and 20 pages, against 100,000 cloud checks and 150 monitors on Distill Professional; check how each counts a check before deciding. changedetection.io's hosted plan covers up to 5,000 URLs for USD 8.99 a month, with re-checks from about every 5 minutes per browser runner.

Before you buy

List the pages and how often each needs a cloud check, multiply pages by checks per day and by 30, and pick a plan whose check allowance and minimum interval both fit. The free plan, with five cloud monitors, is enough to test which part of a page to watch and how alerts arrive.