Undercut alternatives fall into four categories — checking rival prices by hand, tracking them in a spreadsheet, scripting something yourself, or installing a repricing app — and the right one depends on how many products you sell and how many rival shops you genuinely watch.
This round-up is deliberately unromantic: each category wins somewhere, each breaks somewhere, and one of the four options is the app this site is built around. Read the failure column first; your catalog size usually decides before your preferences do.
The four categories at a glance
| Category | Setup effort | Ongoing time | Where it wins | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manual checking | None | A few minutes daily | Under a dozen SKUs, one rival | Holidays, sick days, catalog growth |
| Spreadsheet | An afternoon | Weekly export and formulas | Small catalogs, weekly cadence | Matching, history, any automation |
| Your own script | Days | Maintenance forever | A price change nothing else does | Cost floors, logging, theme updates |
| Repricing app | An hour | Reviewing an approve queue | Catalog scale, multiple rivals | Subscription cost, learning the rules |
1. Manual checking: the honest baseline
Open the rival shop, find the product, compare, edit your price. It is free, it is accurate, and it teaches you more about your competitors in the first month than any dashboard will. The failure mode is not skill, it is continuity: the day nobody checks is the day you are the expensive option, and a sale you did not notice stays unnoticed for a week.
Manual checking is the correct answer for a store with a handful of SKUs and one real rival. If that is you, close this tab — nothing here beats ten minutes with a browser.
2. The spreadsheet: rules without automation
A spreadsheet adds what memory cannot hold: a column per rival, a last-checked date, and a formula that flags the rows where your margin after the match falls below your target. Weekly is a sustainable cadence, and twelve months of rows gives you the seasonal picture no single check can.
What it never solves is matching. Two shops describe the same product with different titles, and half your afternoon goes into deciding whether row 47 is even the same item. Spreadsheets also do not push changes to Shopify — you still edit prices by hand, so the last mile is manual by construction.
3. Your own script: maximum control, permanent maintenance
A script wins when the logic is unusual and the data is yours: drop everything in one collection at 00:00, raise prices when stock falls below three units, apply a supplier’s price file on arrival. Nobody knows your store better than the code you wrote for it.
Then the bills arrive — literally or figuratively. A script that watches rivals has to parse their pages, and rivals change their markup. A script that adjusts prices needs cost data kept current. A script in your theme gets edited by your theme. And nobody but you can read the log you did not build.
4. The app: matching, floors and an audit trail
An app earns its fee on three things no other category provides out of the box: confirmed product matching (barcode first, SKU second, uncertain candidates in a queue that can never trigger a change), a margin floor per variant that blocks any automatic price below your target, and a change log with undo — old price, new price and source stored on every applied change.
Where the app wins: catalogs in the hundreds or thousands, more than one rival shop, and any desire to automate without watching it constantly. Where it loses: a single-product store with one competitor, and shops whose pricing logic is genuinely bespoke — those belong to the script.
How to choose, in four questions
- How many SKUs? Under a dozen: manual. Dozens: spreadsheet. Hundreds or more: app or script.
- How many rival shops? One rival is manageable everywhere; five rivals is a spreadsheet’s ceiling at best.
- Do you need to change prices, or just know them? Knowledge-only needs are cheaper to satisfy than repricing.
- Who fixes it when it breaks? If the answer is “only me, at midnight,” pick the option with no code.
Capyo: Dynamic Pricing is the app option here, and it is honestly not for everyone: the free plan covers 3 products and 1 rival shop with approve-only changes, which is deliberately small — enough to test the workflow, not enough to pretend you do not still check by hand. Paid plans add automatic repricing inside your margin floor, starting at $50/month for 500 products and 10 rivals. If you would rather measure something else today, the free tools hub has the other checkers on this site.
What is the best free alternative to a repricing app?
A spreadsheet with one column per rival and a margin-after-match formula, fed by a weekly manual check. It costs nothing and works up to a weekly cadence on a small catalog; it just never automates the final step of changing the price.
At what catalog size does a repricing app start to pay for itself?
When the weekly manual or spreadsheet routine exceeds the time the subscription costs you — realistically once multiple rival shops and hundreds of products are in play. Below that, manual checking is genuinely the better alternative.
Can I write my own repricing script instead of using an app?
Yes, and it is the right choice for bespoke logic on your own store. Budget for the parts that never end: parsing rival pages that change markup, keeping unit costs current, logging every change, and surviving theme edits.
Does an app remove the need to check prices myself?
No, and any claim otherwise should worry you. An approve-first workflow exists so you keep judgement; you review the queue, spot bad matches and cost errors, and widen automation only when the queue stops surprising you.
What makes one repricing app different from another?
Product matching quality and floor enforcement. Equal barcodes and SKUs confirm themselves, uncertain matches wait in a queue, and no automatic change may cross a margin floor computed from unit cost. Those two mechanisms decide whether automation helps or harms.
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Price gap calculator
Your price, your cost and the rival price in: get your margin, the gap and how far you can undercut without falling below your target margin.
Open the free toolCapyo is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Shopify. "Shopify" is a trademark of Shopify Inc. You approve or set the rules; you own your prices. Capyo reports the rival prices it can fetch from public pages and does not promise any sales, revenue or profit outcome.