Prices, offers and packages
Track competitor prices for local and service businesses
When a rival cuts a price, starts a promotion or changes a package, you usually hear about it from a customer. MyIntelBrief does the competitor price monitoring for you: every night we compare the competitors around you against yesterday, and your morning brief shows only what changed — the before, the after, and one suggested move.
What a price change looks like in a brief
The finding below is copied from a published sample brief for a plumbing contractor in Anaheim. The business is illustrative.
Water-heater install cut from $2,195 → $1,795 and $79 drain cleaning
Tidewell Water Heaters & Plumbing
Tidewell updated their specials page yesterday, with no end date. The $1,795 fine print says “haul-away, expansion tank and code upgrades extra.”
Don’t match the price. A cut is hard to take back, and their fine print already moves the extras off the headline number. Put what YOUR quote includes in writing — permit, haul-away, warranty length — so a homeowner holding two quotes can compare like for like. If you want an answer on drains, add something to the job instead of cutting the rate, such as a camera look on any main-line call.
Notice the move is not “match it.” Tracking competitor prices is only half the job; the other half is deciding whether a change deserves a response at all. Read the full plumber sample brief.
What we watch on competitors’ prices
Prices are where it starts. Competitor price tracking here is not a spreadsheet you refresh — it is part of everything that gets watched for you, every night, across the competitors around you.
Price & offer changes
A rival cuts a price, starts a promotion or changes a package — you see the before and the after, like $2,195 → $1,795.
Services on their own site
A new service line, or a change to what they say they offer on their own site.
What your suppliers are charging
Local market changes are watched too: new competitors opening nearby, permits, local news, and what your suppliers are charging.
What to do next
Each finding comes with one suggested move — often not the obvious one. “Don’t match the price” is a real answer.
Price moves are one part of the picture: reviews, hiring and local news are in the same brief. How our competitor monitoring works covers the rest.
How owners check what competitors charge today
Most local owners already do some competitor price tracking by hand. Each way works once; none of them tells you when something changes.
Call as a customer
Ask for a quote the way a customer would. You get a real number, for one job, on one day, and it takes an afternoon to do it for five rivals.
Read their website and menu
Specials pages, menus and price lists are public. They change without notice, and you have to remember what they said last time to spot the difference.
Ask your customers
Customers who got another quote will often tell you the number. You hear it after the job is lost, and only from the ones who mention it.
Check their Google listing
Services, offers and posts on a rival’s Google listing show what they are pushing. Reading every listing every week is the part nobody keeps up.
Automated tracking does the same reading every night and keeps a dated copy, so a change shows up as a before and an after instead of a vague sense that something moved. It reads public pages only, the same ones you could open yourself.
Competitor price tracking by trade
Restaurants: the menu
A new menu, a price change on a signature dish, a lunch special that appears or ends. See what a burger or a slice costs across real menus in the Menu Index, and price your own dishes with the menu price calculator and food cost calculator.
Plumbing and HVAC: the service-call fee
Trip fees, flat-rate specials and seasonal tune-up offers, posted on rivals’ specials pages. Set your own from your costs with the plumbing and HVAC pricing calculators.
Auto repair: the labor rate and specials
Few shops post their labor rate, but most post specials: oil changes, brakes, inspections. Work out the rate your shop needs with the auto repair labor rate calculator.
When insurance sets the fee
In dentistry, medical care and other insured trades, the posted price is usually set by the plans you accept. What is worth watching there is what insurance does not cover: cosmetic work, memberships, payment plans.
More trades: lawn care, cleaning, pest control, roofing, electrical and landscaping pricing calculators.
Why checking by hand, Google Alerts and AI prompts miss price changes
Checking their sites yourself means opening a dozen competitor sites and comparing them line by line — and remembering what they said last week.
A Google Alert can only match a name that is already being published. We read the pages themselves — pricing included — and report what changed, not what got mentioned.
Asking an AI assistant may well get you a price, but not a date on it — you cannot tell whether it is from this morning or last quarter. Acting on an undated number is the part that costs you. And nothing is watching between your questions, so nothing can tell you the price changed.
We keep a dated copy of every competitor page, every morning, and report only the difference — $16 became $18.50 on Tuesday, the happy-hour page came down. That is an archive problem, not a writing problem, and it is why this is a standing service rather than a prompt you run once. The full comparison walks through every do-it-yourself method.
What you get
A brief waiting in your inbox in the morning: one page, ranked by what matters, a source on every claim and one suggested move. Quiet days stay short. You confirm who you’re watching first — add anyone we missed, drop anyone who isn’t really a rival. Not sure who that is yet? Start with finding your local competitors.
Price monitoring is one piece of our market research services for small business. Start with four free weekly briefs: just your email, no card. Plans are on the pricing page when you want to keep them coming.
Frequently asked questions
- Can’t I just ask ChatGPT what a competitor charges?
- Ask a general assistant what a competitor charges and you may well get an answer. What you will not get is a date on it. You cannot tell whether that price is from this morning, from last quarter, or from whenever the tool last looked — and it will not tell you, because it does not know either. Ask again next month and nothing can tell you the price changed, because nothing kept yesterday’s copy to compare against. We keep a dated copy of every competitor page, every morning, and report only the difference.
- Is this just a Google Alert?
- No — and the gap is the point. A Google Alert can only match a name that is already being published. We read the pages themselves: pricing, hours, reviews, job posts, permits — and report what changed, not what got mentioned.
See a free competitor brief for your business
No signup, no card. Type your business name and pick it from the dropdown. The free preview is a one-time snapshot of today’s public data, with your real competitors named.
Rather look first? Read the plumber sample brief.