Competitive intelligence without Crayon: a $19/month setup for small teams

Crayon and Klue are the two names you hit the moment you search for "competitive intelligence platform." They're in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. They track 300+ signal types, auto-generate battle-cards, pipe everything into Salesforce, and assign you a customer success manager.

They also don't publish a price. It's quote-on-request, the contracts are annual, and they land where you'd expect an enterprise sales motion to land — well past what a small team spends on its entire software stack in a year.

If you're a 3-person agency, a solo consultant, or a small product team, you have the same underlying need as the Fortune 500 — don't get blindsided by a competitor — at about 1% of the scale. This is how to cover that need cheaply, and where the paid shortcut is.

What you actually need (vs. what enterprise CI sells)

Strip the category down and there are four jobs:

1. Watch a defined set of sources — competitor sites, pricing and changelog pages, the two trade publications that matter, a subreddit or two, relevant Google News queries.
2. Filter out the noise — reprints, listicles, job-board scrapes, the same story from eight outlets.
3. Summarize what's left into something you'll actually read.
4. Tell you immediately when something big moves — a price change, a funding round, a key hire.

Enterprise CI adds battle-card management, win/loss analysis, CRM enrichment, and a seat-based rollout for a 15-person product-marketing org. Real features. Not your problem this year.

The DIY stack (free, and it half-works)

You can assemble jobs 1–4 yourself:

• Sources: an RSS reader (Feedly, Inoreader) for feeds and Reddit; Google Alerts / Google News RSS for news; a change-detection tool (Visualping free tier: 5 pages, 2 checks/day; Distill.io) for pricing and changelog pages that have no feed.
• Filter: Feedly's AI tier or Inoreader rules to mute keywords.
• Summarize: paste the week's items into ChatGPT or Claude with a standing prompt.
• Alerts: Visualping/Distill email you on a change; a Zapier or Make flow can push urgent hits to Slack.

This genuinely works. The catches, in order of how much they'll annoy you:

• The summarize step never becomes a habit. It's a manual 20–40 minute job every week and it's the first thing to slip.
• Zapier/Make flows rot. A feed URL changes, an API quota trips, a selector breaks — and you don't notice until you realize you haven't had an alert in a month.
• No cross-source dedup. The same acquisition shows up in your RSS, your Google Alert, and your Reddit feed as three separate things.
• No "why it matters." ChatGPT will summarize an article; it won't know that this is the third price rise in your category this quarter or that it changes your renewal pitch — unless you tell it, every time.

Cost: $0–14/month. Time: a few hours to build, ~30 min/week to run, plus the occasional evening fixing a broken flow.

The paid shortcut (what we're building)

The reason this article exists: we got tired of maintaining that stack and are building the middle option — EveBrief.

You define your sources (RSS, Google News queries, specific URLs we watch for content changes, subreddits — 15 to 40 per project) and describe what matters in plain English: "pricing changes, new features, funding, and key hires at these four competitors; anything about AI Overviews."

You get back one briefing, daily or weekly, by email — grouped by theme, deduplicated across every source, each item with a two-line TL;DR and a "why this matters to you" written against what you said you care about. Plus a separate instant alert the moment something hits your criteria hard.

It's the DIY stack with the two weak parts fixed: the summarize-and- contextualize step is automatic, and there's no flow to maintain.

Pricing is meant to sit where the DIY stack does, not where Crayon does: a free tier (3 sources, weekly), $19/mo (15 sources, daily + alerts), $39/mo (40 sources, 3 projects, shareable web digest, Slack).

Which one should you pick

If your budget is genuinely zero and you don't mind the upkeep, the DIY stack is a legitimate answer — build it. If a competitor changing their pricing while you weren't looking would cost you more than $19, the paid middle option pays for itself.

Where this is

Pre-launch. The pipeline works, we're validating demand before building the full self-serve product. If "one briefing, not 200 alerts" is something you'd pay for, the waitlist gets you early access and launch pricing.

Join the waitlist → · We're building it in the open.