Distill pricing explained: checks, devices and the Flexi plan
What each Distill plan buys, how cloud checks are counted, and why AyeWatch is the better pick for teams that want alerts, not diffs.
Distill pricing looks simple at first: a free plan and three paid tiers at $15, $35 and $80 and up a month. For an operator deciding what to put on the company card, the real cost depends on how checks are counted, how many devices you run, and how many alerts you send. This is a breakdown of what each plan includes, where the meter runs faster than expected, and why AyeWatch is often the better choice for a team that just wants to hear about changes that matter.
The plans
All figures from distill.io/pricing, checked October 2026. Annual billing takes 20% off the monthly price.
| Free | Starter | Professional | Flexi | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $15/mo | $35/mo | $80+/mo |
| Monitors | 25 (5 in cloud) | 50 | 150 | 500+ |
| Fastest cloud interval | 6 hours | 10 minutes | 5 minutes | 2 minutes |
| Cloud checks a month | 1,000 | 30,000 | 100,000 | 200,000+ |
| Devices | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4+ |
| Email and webhook alerts | 30/mo, email only | 2,000/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SMS alerts | None | 100/mo | 250/mo | 500+/mo |
| Version history | None | 10 changes | 20 changes | 20 changes |
Local checks, run by the browser extension or desktop app, are unlimited on every plan. They only run while that device is on.
Where the meter moves
Three rules change the math for a team that relies on cloud monitors.
Checks are counted in 10-second units. A cloud check that takes up to 10 seconds counts once. One that takes 15 seconds counts twice. Heavy pages that load a lot of script can use up a quota faster than the monitor count suggests.
Captchas cost extra. On premium plans Distill can solve Google reCAPTCHA v2 during a cloud check, and each solve counts as 24 additional checks. Turnstile captchas are solved without extra checks.
Nothing rolls over. Unused checks, alerts and other resources expire at the end of each billing period.
On Flexi, usage beyond the reservation is billed at the end of the month: 20 extra monitors per $1, 4,000 cloud checks per $1, 10 SMS per $1, and $15 per extra device. That is flexible, and also harder to forecast.
A worked example
Say a small team wants 40 competitor and supplier pages checked every hour in the cloud, around the clock.
- 40 pages x 24 checks a day x 30 days = 28,800 checks a month, if every check finishes inside 10 seconds.
- That fits Starter's 30,000 checks, barely. A few slow pages or a captcha or two pushes it over, and the next step is Professional at $35.
And the checks are only half the cost. Each of those 40 monitors needs an element picked on the page, and each alert says that the element changed, not whether the change matters. Someone still reads every one.
Why AyeWatch is the better pick for this job
AyeWatch's paid plans start at $9 a month, with no contracts or cancellation fees, and a Free Preview of three runs with no card. The bigger difference is what you get for it:
- A sentence instead of a selector. You paste a URL and describe the change, for example "alert me when a plan, price or contract term changes; ignore banners". A redesign does not break the rule the way it breaks a CSS selector.
- A judgment, not a diff. AI reads each new version of the page against your rule and sends a short summary only when it matches. A rotated banner or a new testimonial stays quiet.
- Fewer monitors to manage. Related pages, such as a competitor's pricing, changelog and careers pages, can share one monitor and one rule.
- No devices to count. Monitors run in AyeWatch's cloud, so nothing depends on a laptop staying awake, and there is no extension to install.
- More than pages. The same kind of rule can follow a topic across the web and on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
- Alerts where people work. Push and the in-app feed on every plan, with email, Slack, Discord, signed webhooks and the REST API on paid plans. Apps run on the web, iOS and Android.
When Distill is cheaper
If your team is happy to run monitors locally on a machine that stays on, Distill's free plan with 25 monitors and unlimited local checks costs nothing, and its element conditions are more precise than anything rule-based. For a single exact value checked every few seconds, that is the better deal. AyeWatch does not do element-level selection.
The operator's view
The question is less "which list price is lower" and more "what does the team get for it". Distill sells checks, devices and alerts, and leaves the reading to you. AyeWatch starts lower, at $9 a month, and spends its effort on telling you which changes matter and what they were. For always-on competitor and market monitoring, that is usually the better use of the budget. AyeWatch's feature-by-feature comparison with Distill shows the rest of the differences.