pricing-packaging-tracker

name	pricing-packaging-tracker
argument-hint	[competitor set, and prior capture if one exists]
description	Track competitor pricing and packaging as a diffable time series. Use when monitoring tiers, gates, limits, and price moves on a monthly or quarterly cadence.
intent	Capture competitor public pricing pages into a stable schema, diff against the prior capture, and report tier changes, price moves, feature-gate shifts, and packaging restructures with URLs and dates — because packaging changes signal strategy earlier than price changes do.
type	workflow
theme	market-intelligence
best_for	["Keeping battle-card pricing sections current without manual screenshot archaeology","Catching packaging restructures — the earliest public signal of a strategy shift","Building the pricing time series that grounds your own pricing decisions"]
scenarios	["Baseline the pricing pages of our four main competitors, then track monthly","Did anyone in our space change pricing or packaging this quarter?"]
estimated_time	15-30 min per run

Pricing & Packaging Tracker

Purpose

Track competitor pricing and packaging as a diffable time series, not a screenshot: capture (or diff) → structure changes → price changes → signals → next-step options. The stable capture schema is the point — run N diffs against run N-1, so the report is what moved, with evidence. And the skill watches structure as closely as numbers, because packaging changes (gates, limits, tier restructures) usually signal strategy earlier than price changes do: a tier that disappears telegraphs a move upmarket months before the price list admits it.

Input

Works best with: the competitor set to track (or the snapshot they came from), and the prior pricing capture if one exists — that's what turns this run into a delta report. Also useful: your own pricing context, if the comparison should include you.

Input supplied inline with the invocation — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it against the question budget; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. With no prior capture the skill runs baseline mode: full capture per competitor, and the delta value starts next run. With no competitor list, it asks — that's one of its two budget questions.

Example invocation: Pricing tracker on [Competitor A], [Competitor B], [Competitor C] — prior capture from April pasted below.

Key Concepts

• Governing protocol: honors the autonomous-investigation contract — question budget of 2, Fact/Inference/Assumption labels, Just Enough Mode, stable schema, 4-option Final Step. Discipline: SIGINT (pricing pages, site diffs) with FININT corroboration — see intelligence-collection-disciplines.
• Time series, not screenshot. A single capture is trivia; the sequence is intelligence. The schema never drifts between runs, because diffability is the entire value.
• Structure over numbers. Record tiers, billing units, feature gates, usage limits, free-tier boundaries, and enterprise-floor signals — not just prices. The gate moves first; the price follows.
• "Contact sales" is data, honestly labeled. Where pricing is opaque, track what is public (editions, gates, published floors) and mark the rest. Infer only with labels; never invent prices, tiers, limits, discounts, or negotiated figures.
• you need pricing advice → (this tracks the market; it doesn't set your price); pricing is fully opaque across the whole set → expect thin results, and consider or win/loss evidence instead.