Frequently asked questions

PriceSentinel is a free, open-source price tracker for products sold by several online stores. You add a product with its links from different shops, PriceSentinel checks the prices on a schedule, keeps the price history and alerts you when the price drops or another store becomes the cheapest. You can use the hosted version at pricesentinel.bogdanandras.com or run it yourself.

Yes. There is no paid plan, no credit card and no ads. To keep the shared server fair for everyone, free accounts have limits: 25 products, up to 3 store links per product and price checks at most every 6 hours. AI features use your own API key, so their cost is billed by your AI provider, not by PriceSentinel.

• 25 tracked products
• Up to 3 store links per product
• Price checks at most every 6 hours
• 10 AI link research jobs per day
• 50 AI assistant messages per day
• 3 notification channels

A self-hosted install has none of these limits.

Open the sign-up page, enter an email address and a password, and you are in. There is no email verification step.

Not yet. The hosted service does not send emails, so there is no password reset link, and a lost password cannot be recovered at the moment. Please store your password in a password manager. If you lose access, you can create a new account.

Create one product and attach a link from each store that sells it, or use Research with AI from the Add button to find store links for you. Every link is checked on the product's schedule, prices are converted into the product's currency and the cheapest in-stock store is shown as the best price, with a history chart for every store.

The first price PriceSentinel captures for a product becomes its base price. Later prices are compared with it, so you can see how much you would save today and get an alert when a price falls a chosen percentage below the base price.

Any store with a public product page. Built-in adapters cover Amazon, eMAG, eBay, Altex/Media Galaxy, cel.ro, PC Garage, evoMAG and a few others. Every other shop goes through a generic pipeline that reads schema.org data, product meta tags and price heuristics. If a page still cannot be read, an AI model with your own key can extract the price as a last resort. Some shops block automated requests; those may not work.

On the hosted service you choose the interval per product, as often as every 6 hours. Checks are spread out with a little random delay, retried with back-off when a store fails, and spaced politely per store. Self-hosted installs can check as often as you like.

Yes. Formats such as 1.299,99 lei, 1,299.99, 1 299 zł and £51.77 are understood, and each store's price is converted into the product's currency with daily exchange rates from the European Central Bank.

Add a notification channel in Settings → Notifications: Discord, Slack, Telegram, ntfy or a webhook. By default you are alerted when a store becomes cheaper than every other store. You can also set a target price, a percentage below the base price, back-in-stock alerts or alerts on any price change. Every alert also lands in the in-app alert inbox.

Not on the hosted service yet. Use Discord, Slack, Telegram, ntfy or a webhook instead. If you self-host PriceSentinel, you can send email alerts through your own SMTP server.

No. Tracking, price extraction and alerts work without AI. A key is only needed for AI link research, the AI assistant and the AI fallback that reads prices from difficult pages. Supported providers are Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Google Gemini (through its OpenAI-compatible endpoint), Mistral, DeepSeek and any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

You do, directly to your AI provider, because the requests use your own API key. That includes scheduled checks where the AI fallback extracts a price. PriceSentinel does not resell AI usage or add a margin.

API keys and notification credentials are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and are masked when the app shows them back to you. They are only used to make the requests you asked for.

On the hosted service the endpoint has to be reachable from the internet, so a model running only on your own computer will not work. If you self-host PriceSentinel, you can point it at Ollama or LM Studio and keep everything on your own machine.

The built-in MCP server is available when you self-host PriceSentinel, not on the hosted service for now. See the self-hosting guide for the setup.

No analytics, no trackers and no ads. The only cookie is the session cookie that keeps you logged in. Read the privacy policy for the details.

Yes. You can export your data and delete your account from the settings page at any time.

Yes. It is open source under the MIT license and runs with Docker Compose, from source with Node.js or as a desktop app. Self-hosted installs have no limits and add email alerts, Gotify, the MCP server and local AI models. See the self-hosting guide.

Yes, for Windows, macOS and Linux. It runs the whole tracker on your computer, keeps checking from the tray and shows native notifications. Download it from the latest GitHub release.

Open an issue in the PriceSentinel GitHub repository. Issues are public, so never include passwords, API keys or other personal data.