Email is great. Telegram is great. But what if you just want your browser to ping you the moment a price drops, without having to check your inbox or open another app? That is the idea behind Web Push notifications, the headline feature of v0.7. Alongside it, we shipped dashboard search, performance improvements, and a more responsive notification system.
Web Push Notifications
Web Push is a browser-native notification system. Once you grant permission, DealMonitor can send you notifications directly through your browser, even when our website is not open. Your phone buzzes, your desktop shows a notification, and you can jump straight to the deal with one tap.
How It Works
Under the hood, Web Push uses a technology called VAPID (Voluntary Application Server Identification). We generate a unique key pair for our server. When you subscribe to push notifications, your browser creates a subscription with its own encryption keys and sends it to us. When a price drops, we encrypt the notification with your keys and send it to your browser's push service, which delivers it to your device.
The entire flow is end-to-end secure. We cannot read notifications after they are encrypted and sent. Your browser's push service cannot read them either because they are encrypted with your keys. Only your browser can decrypt and display the notification.
A service worker runs in the background on your device, listening for incoming push messages. When one arrives, the service worker creates a native notification with the product name, the new price, and a link to your dashboard. Click it, and you are taken directly to the tracker.
Three Channels, Your Choice
With Web Push, DealMonitor now supports three independent notification channels:
- Email for detailed price drop summaries you can read at your own pace.
- Telegram for instant messages in your favorite chat app.
- Web Push for native browser notifications without any third-party app.
Each channel can be toggled independently per tracker. Get Telegram alerts for that GPU you have been watching, email summaries for your wishlist, and push notifications for time-sensitive deals. Mix and match however you like.
Dashboard Search
As your tracker collection grows, finding a specific product becomes tedious. Scrolling through dozens of tracker cards is not practical. v0.7 adds a search bar at the top of your dashboard that filters trackers in real time.
Type a product name, a shop domain, or part of a URL, and the dashboard instantly shows only matching trackers. The search is fast because it runs entirely in the browser against your already-loaded tracker data. No server round-trip, no loading spinner.
Toast Notifications and Confirmation Dialogs
We replaced browser alert boxes with toast notifications and styled confirmation dialogs. When you perform an action like deleting a tracker or changing a setting, you now see a subtle notification that slides in from the corner instead of a jarring browser popup.
Destructive actions like deleting a tracker show a proper confirmation dialog with clear "Cancel" and "Delete" buttons. No more accidentally deleting trackers because you hit Enter on a browser confirm box.
Async Notification Delivery
In earlier versions, notifications were sent synchronously during the price check cycle. If a notification service was slow (email servers sometimes take several seconds to respond), it would delay the entire scraping queue.
v0.7 moves notification delivery to an asynchronous pipeline. Price checks complete immediately, and notifications are queued for delivery in a separate thread. This means your trackers are checked on schedule even if an email server is having a slow day.
Health Check Endpoints
Every container in our Docker setup now exposes a health check endpoint. Docker monitors these endpoints and automatically restarts containers that stop responding. The frontend, backend, database, and detector service all participate.
This sounds like an infrastructure detail, but the effect is tangible: if any part of the system crashes, it recovers automatically within seconds instead of waiting for us to notice and restart it manually.
Database Performance
We added indexes on all key database columns used in dashboard queries. Loading your tracker list, fetching price history, and checking notification status are all significantly faster, especially for users with many trackers.
We also fixed an N+1 query issue where loading a list of trackers would make one additional database query per tracker to fetch the associated shop. The fix uses eager loading to fetch everything in a single query. For a user with 50 trackers, this reduces database queries from 51 to 1.
Per-User Tracker Limits
To keep the system running smoothly for everyone, we introduced per-user tracker limits. Free accounts can track a generous number of products. This prevents any single user from overwhelming the scraping queue and ensures fair resource distribution.
Lazy Image Loading
Tracker cards now load product images lazily. When you open your dashboard, only the images visible on screen are loaded immediately. Images for trackers below the fold load as you scroll down. On a dashboard with many trackers, this reduces the initial page load time noticeably.
What This Means for You
v0.7 is about making DealMonitor faster and more convenient to use daily:
- Push notifications mean you never have to check your dashboard manually for price drops.
- Dashboard search makes finding trackers instant, no matter how many you have.
- Faster loading through database optimization and lazy images.
- Better reliability through health checks and async notifications.
Enable Web Push in your account settings and let your browser do the watching for you. For the complete list of changes, visit our changelog.
