IFTTT pricing in 2026, and what a monitoring setup costs
IFTTT itself is cheap. Getting competitor and market alerts out of it usually means adding feeds and filters, which changes the math.
IFTTT pricing is about as simple as software pricing gets: a free tier, a $2.99 tier and an $8.99 tier, both paid tiers quoted on yearly billing. For a founder the question is rarely whether IFTTT is cheap. It is. The question is what it costs to get the outcome you bought it for, which for many operators is staying on top of competitors, customers and market news. That outcome often takes more than one tool. This piece runs the numbers.
IFTTT's plans
From IFTTT's plans page, checked in October 2026:
| Plan | Price | Applets | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 forever | 2 | Standard speed, unlimited runs |
| Pro | $2.99/mo billed yearly ($35.88/yr) | 20 | Fastest speed, multi-action Applets, webhooks |
| Pro+ | $8.99/mo billed yearly ($107.88/yr) | Unlimited | Queries and filters, AI services, multiple accounts, developer tools |
IFTTT says yearly billing saves 40%. The RSS trigger, which most monitoring applets use, polls hourly on Free and every five minutes on Pro and Pro+.
What a monitoring stack built on IFTTT really costs
Say you want to watch five things: two competitor pricing pages, a competitor's blog, mentions of your company in the news, and a subreddit where your customers talk.
With IFTTT alone, only the blog and possibly the news search have feeds. The pricing pages and the subreddit filter need something else. A common build:
- IFTTT Pro for enough Applets and five-minute polling: $35.88 a year.
- RSS.app to make feeds from the pages that lack them. The free plan gives two feeds refreshed every 24 hours. Basic, at $8.32 a month billed yearly, gives 15 feeds refreshed hourly.
- Your time writing keyword filters and reading the alerts that slip through. "New feed item matches" fires on any item containing the keyword, so a competitor's name in a listicle counts the same as their funding announcement.
That is roughly $11.31 a month on yearly billing, plus the triage. If you want the matches routed into your CRM or a sheet with more steps, Zapier's paid plan starts at $19.99 a month.
The same five jobs on a monitor
AyeWatch covers all five in one place. Pricing pages go in as Webpages monitors. The blog and news coverage become Internet topics written as sentences. The subreddit is a Reddit monitor with a plain-English filter. Each alert is judged by meaning and arrives with a short summary and its sources.
You can start with a Free Preview of three runs and no card, and paid plans start at $9 a month. No contract and no cancellation fee. The bigger saving is in setup: there are no feeds to generate and no keyword lists to maintain, because you write a rule such as "tell me when a competitor changes a plan price, and ignore layout tweaks" and AyeWatch judges each change against it. Alerts land in the web, iOS and Android apps, and paid plans add Slack, email and webhooks, so the news reaches the place your team already works.
Side by side for the five-job stack
| IFTTT Pro + RSS.app Basic | AyeWatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | About $11.31 (both billed yearly) | Paid plans from $9 |
| Pages with no feed | Via generated feeds, hourly refresh | Watched directly |
| Matching | Keyword or phrase | Meaning, from a sentence |
| What you read | Raw feed items | A summary per alert |
| Slack, email, webhooks | Through Applets | On paid plans, per monitor |
| Tools to manage | Two | One |
Where IFTTT is still the better spend
If your applets mostly run your office or home, like smart plugs, calendars and photo backups, IFTTT Pro at $35.88 a year is very good value and nothing on this page replaces it. Keep it. The comparison only tips when the job is finding out what changed.
The founder math
For alerts, the cost that matters is the time spent reading noise. A monitor that only fires on a real change, and tells you what changed, pays for itself if it saves a few minutes a week. See AyeWatch's plans and try the free preview on one competitor before you commit.