I got frustrated that every fuel price app just shows you what's cheap nearby. I wanted to know how stations actually behave: do prices go up faster than they come down, do supermarkets really save you much, how bad are motorway prices really?
So I built a scraper that hits the UK government's mandatory Fuel Finder API every 10 minutes and stores every price change. 90k records across 7,700 stations since January.
Some things I found that surprised me:
The rocket and feather effect is real and measurable. When stations raise prices the average move is 2.35p/litre. When they cut, it's 1.85p. There are also more up moves than down moves. I queried the raw history to check this rather than eyeballing a chart.
Motorway fuel is 28.4p/litre more expensive than everywhere else right now. That's about £14 extra on a 50L fill. Everyone knows motorways are expensive but I didn't expect the gap to be that wide.
The supermarket discount is only about 1.7p. I assumed it would be bigger.
Stack is Azure Functions, TimescaleDB, PostGIS, Next.js. The interesting thing about this project is the history. No public site shows how an individual station has priced over time or how a local cluster of stations react to each other. That's what I'm building towards.
> So I built a scraper that hits the UK government's mandatory Fuel Finder API every 10 minutes and stores every price change. 90k records across 7,700 stations since January.
Only 1 change per station per week on average? Fewer than I expected. Not sure I'd call it a scraper, myself.
>The rocket and feather effect is real and measurable. When stations raise prices the average move is 2.35p/litre. When they cut, it's 1.85p. There are also more up moves than down moves. I queried the raw history to check this rather than eyeballing a chart.
Comparing the absolute size of price rises vs drops doesn't make sense, because it could very well be an issue with the underlying price (eg. crude oil or whatever). It seems hardly fair to blame gas stations for being slow to lower prices, when refineries are still also slow to lower prices. Same for blaming refineries when the global market is slow to lower prices.
My company network wont let me see newly registered domains, so I couldn't check out your build (I'll wait until I get home!), but our local state government set up a tool called Fuel Watch that does a pretty good job of showing the today/tomorrow pricing based on post code.
Hi, economist focused on monetary policy/inflation here! That data would make for a cool empirical paper that could help central banks and other economists better understand price dynamics around a significant shock. Are you interested in discussing it?
> I got frustrated that every fuel price app just shows you what's cheap nearby.
Yes it gets a bit tiring. Considering the difference is usually 0.01 penny per litre, so it doesnt make a big difference. But it does mean in a panic everyone runs to that one station and it runs out
I never understood the logic of driving 20 miles to save 0.01p/litre (but then I live in the countryside, maybe its different in cities-- though cities also have huge traffic so you are wasting the same amount of fuel)
I wonder if your API queries get capped / paginated or if those stations really do not report any changes for so long. It would be interesting to know if there is a pattern with those low frequency updates.
In Germany fuel processes must be reported to the anti trust authority (Bundeskartellamt) the data is than published to providers of apps and websites. Unfortunately there isn't a free public data stream from them.
Update for anyone who hit a slow site earlier: b1ms postgres wasn't having a great time with 140 concurrent users. scaled the db up, bumped the instance, and shipped in-memory output caching while the thread was live so repeated requests stop hammering the db. Site is fully up and fast now. appreciate the interest, genuinely didn't expect to front page today.
I'll just mention that the site is very hard to read for me (to the degree it's unusable). I know, dark mode is cool, but for me it causes immediate eye strain.
I have read that people with astigmatism will often have an easier time reading light mode. Something like 30% of adults have that issue.
Just wanted to provide the feedback so you're aware.
If you can find a way to combine this with local population to end up at pence per litre per thousand population, I bet you’d uncover some fun trends. Bet it’d also get interesting if combined with population within an X min drive too.
Tho really need some car population per road segment stats to drive the most out of it IMO.
The interactive map seems to be a bit broken (lots of grey dots vs brand colours, lots of broken mouseovers where many stations don't show price on hover)
Dashboard Price Comparison, you really need to re-think the colours, perhaps especially Shell Red vs Esso Red
Interesting that the prices were at their highest level a month ago and not today. Here in Calgary the prices seemed to be C$1.829/L (US$5.09/gal or £0.99/L) this weekend, and I don't think I've ever seen them that high before in Alberta.
My main takeaway is you guys have a database (even if imperfect) for this. Here in the US we only have GasBuddy which is purely a crowdsourced best-effort thing. Problem is it’s tough to tell at a glance if a bunch of prices are equally old or if only some have been updated today. If some are stale and others fresh, pretty tough to even use the data.
I've had this stubborn idea in my head, for a long time, that the petrol station up on Knight's Hill in South London is placed at the absolute nexus of London traffic to collect the best petrol rates across the entire city at any given time.
But yet to explore how I'd validate this idea. Your site helps remind me to have a dig at it.
I don't think there is a large intersection between these two groups at least in Europe. Price sensitive people didn't buy SUV. Better-off folks who buy SUV unlikely to be significantly affected by this price increase. In the US it may be different because most cars on the market are SUV/tracks and it's harder to find a small car.
38 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadSo I built a scraper that hits the UK government's mandatory Fuel Finder API every 10 minutes and stores every price change. 90k records across 7,700 stations since January.
Some things I found that surprised me:
The rocket and feather effect is real and measurable. When stations raise prices the average move is 2.35p/litre. When they cut, it's 1.85p. There are also more up moves than down moves. I queried the raw history to check this rather than eyeballing a chart.
Motorway fuel is 28.4p/litre more expensive than everywhere else right now. That's about £14 extra on a 50L fill. Everyone knows motorways are expensive but I didn't expect the gap to be that wide.
The supermarket discount is only about 1.7p. I assumed it would be bigger.
Stack is Azure Functions, TimescaleDB, PostGIS, Next.js. The interesting thing about this project is the history. No public site shows how an individual station has priced over time or how a local cluster of stations react to each other. That's what I'm building towards.
Site: https://fuelinsight.co.uk
Happy to talk through the architecture or the data if anyone's interested.
Only 1 change per station per week on average? Fewer than I expected. Not sure I'd call it a scraper, myself.
157p/L national average is about 8 USD/G.
Comparing the absolute size of price rises vs drops doesn't make sense, because it could very well be an issue with the underlying price (eg. crude oil or whatever). It seems hardly fair to blame gas stations for being slow to lower prices, when refineries are still also slow to lower prices. Same for blaming refineries when the global market is slow to lower prices.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/03/29/stop-publishing-ga...
Why did you make 'Esso' and 'Shell' the same colour in your brand chart?
...
Just curious, not intending this as an attack on your project.
If a new user clicks on Accept, he has no (normie) mechanism to revoke that as the choice is stored in local storage and it doesn't expire.
Probably not doing exactly what your tool does, but you might be interested: https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/
Yes it gets a bit tiring. Considering the difference is usually 0.01 penny per litre, so it doesnt make a big difference. But it does mean in a panic everyone runs to that one station and it runs out
I never understood the logic of driving 20 miles to save 0.01p/litre (but then I live in the countryside, maybe its different in cities-- though cities also have huge traffic so you are wasting the same amount of fuel)
https://www.fuelthai.com/
Like this one: https://www.fuelinsight.co.uk/stations/7fd603ba12430695595b2...
I wonder if your API queries get capped / paginated or if those stations really do not report any changes for so long. It would be interesting to know if there is a pattern with those low frequency updates.
One man job, 2 weeks I think and we launched.
Nice project :)
List of authorized places using the data: https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/DE/Aufgaben/Markttransparenz...
One of those vendors publishes it as creative commons data set, though. Including historic data. https://creativecommons.tankerkoenig.de/
For now data can only be exported as xlsx but with the open data orientation of Québec's government, I guess it will be available soon
I have read that people with astigmatism will often have an easier time reading light mode. Something like 30% of adults have that issue.
Just wanted to provide the feedback so you're aware.
Tho really need some car population per road segment stats to drive the most out of it IMO.
The interactive map seems to be a bit broken (lots of grey dots vs brand colours, lots of broken mouseovers where many stations don't show price on hover)
Dashboard Price Comparison, you really need to re-think the colours, perhaps especially Shell Red vs Esso Red
I would rather push the car then pay motorway prices.
But yet to explore how I'd validate this idea. Your site helps remind me to have a dig at it.
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I prefer Google maps but they never had petrol prices....
Any Waze Devs here? Tried to raise a feature request but it was such a pain