Competitor tracking

The problem#

A competitor shows up in many small places: a blog feed, a release page, a package registry, a launch thread. Checking them all by hand every week is easy to skip.

Each of those is one Onekey call, so a daily digest is a short script you run on a schedule you control.

Endpoints to call#

Each endpoint name links to its reference page with every parameter, the caching window and a recorded response.

Your first call#

This is web.feed (3 credits). Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your key; sign up, no card. 1,000 free credits cover the open-platform endpoints. Hard-to-reach platforms (X, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and others marked on their page) need a verified email and a purchased pack.

curl "https://api.onekey.dev/v1/web/feed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.blog%2Ffeed%2F" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

A working script#

For each competitor, list the newest blog posts, the latest release, package downloads and recent Hacker News discussion. Store what you saw last run and print only the differences.

import os
import requests

API = "https://api.onekey.dev"
HEADERS = {"x-api-key": os.environ["ONEKEY_KEY"]}


def call(path, **params):
    """GET /v1/<platform>/<endpoint>; returns the data or raises with the error code."""
    r = requests.get(f"{API}/v1/{path}", params=params, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    body = r.json()
    if not body["success"]:
        raise RuntimeError(f"{path}: {body['error']['code']}")
    return body["data"]


def get(item, field):
    """get(item, 'content.title'): a field of the unified schema, or None."""
    for key in field.split("."):
        item = (item or {}).get(key)
    return item


COMPETITORS = [
    {
        "feed": "https://competitor.example/blog/feed.xml",  # find it once: call("web/feeds", url="https://competitor.example")
        "owner": "competitor", "repo": "sdk",
        "npm": "competitor-sdk",
        "domain": "competitor.example",
    },
]

for c in COMPETITORS:
    for post in call("web/feed", url=c["feed"])[:5]:
        print("post   ", get(post, "content.createdAt"), get(post, "content.title"))
    rel = call("github/latest_release", owner=c["owner"], repo=c["repo"])
    print("release", get(rel, "content.createdAt"), get(rel, "content.title"))
    dl = call("npm/downloads", name=c["npm"])
    print("npm    ", get(dl, "entity.stats.downloads"), "downloads")
    for story in call("hackernews/search_url", q=c["domain"])[:5]:
        print("HN     ", get(story, "engagement.likes"), get(story, "content.title"))

What a month costs#

Illustrative volume, not a benchmark: 10 competitors checked once a day for 30 days (300 calls per endpoint), plus a one-off feed discovery for each.

About 3,020 credits: the Starter pack (5,000 credits, $9) covers it, at $1.80 per 1,000 credits. Prices are in USD (regional pricing is planned); credits never expire. See pricing.

Every figure above assumes every call is a fresh fetch. These endpoints cache for 30 seconds to 1 hour. Free when served from cache (0.2 credit for a cached response over 100 KB). Repeating a call inside that window costs nothing. Invalid, failed and not-found calls are not charged either.

Good to know#

• This covers public, machine-readable sources. If a competitor publishes no feed, no public repository and no package, there is nothing here to read.
• Calls repeated inside an endpoint cache window are free, so re-running a script within a few minutes costs nothing extra.

Keep reading#

• Caching
• Batch requests
• Errors
• Platform pages: Web pages, GitHub, npm, Hacker News