New
- Take your data with you. Track now exports every competitor you follow as a CSV, and Analyze produces a branded PDF intel report you can hand to a client or a co-founder. Both are on Vantage and the trial.
- Your trial now runs 14 days instead of 7, so you see a full cycle of competitor activity before deciding.
- Signing up from the pricing page remembers the plan you picked. Choosing a plan carries that choice into billing, with the right plan highlighted and the billing period you selected already set.
- Three more website signals. Rivale now flags a new comparison page aimed at you, a changed guarantee, and a shift in who a competitor is targeting.
- Rivale now reads competitor announcements. Blog posts, release announcements, acquisitions and partnerships are recognised as news rather than passed over, so a competitor being acquired reaches you instead of being discarded.
- Urgent alerts are now available on Signal. They stay off until you switch them on in notification settings.
- Records is a scannable ledger. One line per read with its type, urgency and date, plus a filter by type, so the view stays usable as months of history build up.
Improved
- Plain English everywhere. Read-type labels were rewritten to drop jargon: “Your shipping lead” is now “Your release advantage”, “Stale competitor” is “Inactive competitor”, “Security patch” is “Security update”.
- Evidence links in your weekly email open the exact record, scrolled to and expanded, instead of dropping you on a page to hunt for it.
- Records splits cleanly into Active and Closed. The old “Past” view included active records, so newer dates showed under Past than under Active. Closed is now the exact opposite of Active.
- A closed record now looks closed. Its status badge used to be swallowed by a long headline, so handled items still read as open. Retired records say “No longer applies”.
- The Rivale logo sits in the sidebar on every page and takes you home, including on billing, settings and the projects list where it was missing.
- Download spikes say what caused them. A jump that lands in the same week as a competitor’s release is now labelled as release-driven, so a routine launch bump doesn’t read as momentum.
- Your plugin’s name reads correctly in the weekly summary subject line and body, in insights headlines, and on website-change records.
- Weekly summary cards name the right plugin. A read about a competitor could print your own plugin’s name beside it.
- Your weekly summary shows everything it should. A grouping fault collapsed the email down to a fraction of the items that qualified, so most of the week’s activity never appeared.
- Delivery history tells you which state a message is in. Rows now separate delivered, nothing owed, no channel set up, and a genuine failure, so an alert you had simply switched off no longer shows as failed.
- Saving a monitored URL says what happens next — a first snapshot now, change detection from the next daily check — instead of implying changes appear immediately.
- Signal is priced and described as a single-user plan, and plan wording across billing now says “Urgent alerts” where it used to say “Real-time”.
Fixed
- Competitor “changes” that never happened no longer reach you. A failed page check could make Rivale treat a page as brand new and report a change that had not occurred. One such alert repeated several times before the fix. Page checks now compare against the last successful read.
- Editing a monitored URL keeps its history. Changing a tracked page’s address — even adding a trailing slash — used to detach everything already collected for it and trigger a false change alert.
- Charts and review breakdowns no longer go stale at the edges. Several figures were computed from a capped slice of the underlying data. Review-positioning shares came out skewed, and the review chart dropped its most recent days, which is the edge you actually read.
- WordPress compatibility is measured against the real WordPress release. Rivale took “the latest version” from what plugin authors typed into their own readme files, so two plugins claiming a version WordPress never shipped made everyone else look behind.
- Marketing links to sign-up work. The sign-up address had no page behind it and returned a 404.
- Support-gap alerts stop repeating while a competitor’s forum sits unchanged, instead of re-firing on the same unchanged state.
- Upgrade emails no longer promise features that don’t exist. “API access” and “Priority support” were listed for Vantage and have been removed.
- Plan comparison reads correctly for a single project instead of “1 projects”.
Security
- Internal configuration is no longer reachable through the API. Rivale’s own scoring and threshold logic is sealed from client access.
- Plan limits are enforced server-side, so what your plan allows no longer depends on the interface.