FollowThatPage ticket alerts have a small legend behind them. The service's FAQ quotes a user who missed the Glastonbury sale, pointed Follow That Page at the ticket page, and a month later got an email when "SOLD OUT" turned into "CLICK HERE". They ran for a connection and bought a ticket. An hour later the page was sold out again.
That story is the whole problem with ticket and restock hunting in one paragraph. The window is short, the alert has to reach you fast, and it has to reach you somewhere you will see it. Here is how Follow That Page handles that today, and what a phone-first monitor like AyeWatch does differently.
How Follow That Page watches a ticket page
You give it the page address and your email. It fetches the page on a schedule, compares the text with the last version, and emails you the lines that were added or removed.
The schedule is the catch. A free account gets 20 daily checks and one hourly check. The daily run starts at 8:00 in the morning, Central European time. If you set more than one page to hourly, they take turns: five hourly pages means each one is looked at every five hours. A Pro account raises the limits to 20 hourly checks and five checks every 10 minutes, and 10 minutes is the fastest it will ever go.
There are a few more things worth knowing before you rely on it for a drop:
- It is email only. There is no app and no SMS. The FAQ suggests forwarding to your phone through an email-to-SMS service.
- It does not run JavaScript. Many ticket and shop pages load their stock status with scripts, and Follow That Page will not see those.
- Sites can block it. Its own home page warns Glastonbury fans that the festival may block the service at any moment, and asks them not to expect too much.
- Emails can end up in spam. The FAQ recommends whitelisting the sender.
None of this is hidden. Follow That Page is a free hobby project and says so plainly.
What changes with a phone-first monitor
AyeWatch starts from a different idea of what an alert is. You paste the page and write what you are waiting for in a sentence:
"Tell me when Saturday standing tickets show as available, and ignore changes to the artist bios."
AyeWatch reads each new version of the page against that sentence. A banner rotating or a countdown ticking does not count. When the thing you described happens, you get a push notification on your phone with a short summary of what changed.
Push to the iOS and Android apps comes with every plan, including the Free Preview. Paid plans also add email, Slack, Discord and webhooks if you want a backup channel.
How fast is fast enough?
For a festival resale page, hourly may be too slow. AyeWatch's Pro plan at $9 a month monitors hourly. Pro+ at $19 a month adds ASAP mode, the fastest speed it offers, made for urgent, time-sensitive topics. Checking more often uses more monitoring credits, and the app shows an estimate per day before you save, so you can run ASAP for the week of a drop and slow it down afterwards.
Auto mode is another option: it speeds up when a page is busy and eases off when nothing is happening.
Restocks work the same way
The same setup covers a sold-out console bundle, a limited board game print run or a collector's edition of a game. Write the rule around the change that matters: "alert me when the add to basket button appears" or "tell me if the price drops below $60". One monitor can also cover several shop pages under the same rule, which helps when you do not know which retailer will restock first.
When Follow That Page is still enough
If the page is plain HTML, changes rarely, and an email within a day is fast enough, Follow That Page does the job for free. It is a good choice for an annual event announcement page or a venue's static "coming soon" list.
The honest summary
No monitor can promise you a ticket. Sites can block automated visitors, and stock can vanish in minutes. What you can control is how quickly the alert reaches you and how much noise surrounds it. Email once an hour, with every text change included, is a slow way to hear about a short window. A push alert that only fires for the change you asked about is a faster one.
You can test it on a real page with AyeWatch's Free Preview, which includes three monitoring runs on up to three topics with no card. Set up your first drop alert here.