Developers who go looking for a Hexowatch API alternative usually want the same thing: page and topic changes delivered as events their own code can act on, without paying a team-plan price to get a webhook. This comparison looks at Hexowatch and AyeWatch from that angle, with a short note on the self-hosted route.
Two meanings of "API" in Hexowatch
Hexowatch uses the word in two ways, and it helps to separate them.
- API as something to watch. One of its watch types monitors a JSON response field by field and reports when a field is added, removed or changes. It sits alongside its page, RSS, sitemap and uptime watches.
- API as a way to control your account and receive events. Its pricing lists "Slack, API, Webhooks & MCP" as integrations on Plus ($55 a month, or $38.50 billed yearly) and Scale ($190 a month). The Personal plan at $15 a month lists no integrations, and its alerts go by email.
So if you want programmatic access and webhooks from Hexowatch, the entry price is the Plus plan.
What AyeWatch gives a developer
AyeWatch's REST API comes with every paid plan, starting with Pro at $9 a month. With it you can:
- create, list, update and delete monitors (AyeWatch calls them topics)
- receive
topic.updatewebhook events that carry an AI-written summary of what changed - verify each webhook with an HMAC signature before trusting it
There is also an MCP server at https://ayewatch.ai/api/mcp, available on every paid plan with an API key. Connect an assistant to it and you can ask it to watch a release notes page and tell you when a new version ships, and the agent creates the monitor for you.
The monitors themselves are more than URLs. A topic can be a plain-English description searched across more than a billion sources, and you can follow accounts or communities on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. For a developer that means one webhook format for "the changelog page changed" and "someone on Reddit reported a breaking bug in the SDK".
Side by side
| AyeWatch | Hexowatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest plan with an API | Pro, $9/mo | Plus, $55/mo ($38.50 yearly) |
| Webhooks | Every paid plan, HMAC-signed | Plus and up |
| MCP server | Every paid plan | Plus and up |
| Slack and Discord | Every paid plan | Plus and up (also Teams, Telegram) |
| What a monitor can watch | Pages, open-web topics, social media | Pages, RSS, sitemaps, JSON, APIs, WHOIS, tech stack, source code, uptime |
| How changes are judged | Semantic rule in plain English | AI change analysis on Plus and up |
Hexowatch figures are from its current pricing catalog, checked October 2026.
Why the entry plan matters for builders
On AyeWatch the API, signed webhooks and the MCP server come with every paid plan, from $9 a month, so you can build against them without moving to a bigger tier. Auto mode, on paid plans, speeds up checks while a topic is busy and slows them when it goes quiet, and every event carries an AI summary of the change.
Hexowatch uses tokens. Its catalog lists a simple check at 1 token, a browser check at 5, a residential proxy visit at 15 and an AI analysis at 25. Unused monthly tokens do not carry over.
A typical setup
A small team shipping a developer tool might run:
- a webpage monitor on a dependency's changelog, with the rule "alert on a new major version or a deprecation notice"
- a topic monitor for "outage reports or breaking changes in our SDK"
- a Reddit monitor on the relevant subreddit filtered to bug reports
All three post to one webhook endpoint that drops a message into the team channel and opens a ticket when the summary mentions a breaking change.
The self-hosted option
If you would rather own the whole pipeline, changedetection.io is open source under Apache 2.0 and runs in Docker. It has its own REST API, more than 85 notification services and browser steps for logged-in pages. The cost is your time: you run the container, the updates and the filters.
When Hexowatch is the better API choice
Pick Hexowatch if you need to watch a JSON API field by field, track WHOIS or DNS records, follow a site's tech stack or check uptime from the same account. Its managed browsers and residential proxies also help with sites that block automated visits. AyeWatch does not cover those jobs.
Getting started
Read the AyeWatch API and MCP details on its home page, then create one monitor on the Free Preview to see the summary format before wiring up a webhook. A longer comparison of the field is in the Hexowatch alternatives write-up.