Competitive research
Remember what your competitors looked like six months ago.
Products change. Pricing changes. Positioning changes. Onboarding changes. Websites change.
The screenshot you saved months ago may become more valuable after the original page is gone. Shelf gives competitive research a memory.
- Jan“The fastest way to organise anything”
- MarThree tiers, free plan prominent
- MayFour-step first run, before the redesign
- JunThat unusual two-column payment step
- AugNew line: “your team's memory”
- NowWhen did they stop talking about speed?
Next quarter
The old capture answers a question the live site can no longer answer.
The internet overwrites itself.
A competitor changes a page and yesterday's version disappears.
Your saved memory doesn't have to.
- Pricing before the increase
- The onboarding flow before the redesign
- Positioning language they've since dropped
- A feature page that quietly no longer exists
Four steps, repeated over years.
- 01 · KeepCaptureKeep useful competitor evidence.
- 02 · WhyContextRemember what project or question made it relevant.
- 03 · ConnectCompareReconnect related memories.
- 04 · RecallReturnFind historical references later.
This isn't monitoring.
Shelf doesn't watch competitor websites, crawl them on a schedule, or alert you when something changes. It has no idea those companies exist.
What it has is what you kept, and the ability to bring those captures back years later, with the context you kept them in.
Searching your own archive.
The value shows up when the live page can no longer answer the question.
What you remember
Three tiers, the free plan was pushed hard. They've changed it since.
Clues Shelf can use
- Pricing table with tier columns
- Plan names and figures read inside the image
- Kept in March
- Looks like
- A three-column pricing table.
- Text inside
- Tier names and prices are readable.
- Time
- March, before the current page existed.
Kept nearby
- Note: three tiers, one obvious · March
- Homepage, January · January
What makes an old capture findable.
- 01Contextual searchNarrow by the period and the question behind it.
- 02Visual searchFind the page by what it looked like.
- 03RediscoveryOld captures resurface when the topic returns.
- 04ScreenshotsThe format most of this archive is in.
- 05BookmarksThe link, and why you stopped on the page.
- 06Compare ShelfHow Shelf sits next to the alternatives.
Your competitive archive isn't a shared dataset.
What you watch and why is strategy. Shelf keeps it on your Mac, reads it locally, and has no account behind which someone else could see it.
Competitive research gets more useful when it has a past.
Remember what changed.
Keep the page when you notice it. In a year it becomes the only copy that exists.
Next thought
The web deletes its own history quietly, and nobody sends a notice.
The forgotten internetKeep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.