by theazureguy
12 subcomments
- 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.
Site: https://fuelinsight.co.uk
Happy to talk through the architecture or the data if anyone's interested.
by isoprophlex
2 subcomments
- If only this wasn't hosted on azure, we'd be able to actually look at the data
by johannes1234321
1 subcomments
- 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.
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/
by unglaublich
2 subcomments
- It keeps surprising me how people obsess over a 20% fuel price increase, but take a 20% fuel consumption increase for granted when they buy a big SUV.
by theazureguy
0 subcomment
- 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.
by mootothemax
2 subcomments
- 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.
by whynotmaybe
1 subcomments
- In Québec every station must report price change within 5 minutes and we have access to a map
https://regieessencequebec.ca/
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
- 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.
by traceroute66
1 subcomments
- Nice work, couple of observations ...
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.
- Good work, that. The area data is very interesting as well, but what surprises me is the relatively low spread excluding motorways.
I would rather push the car then pay motorway prices.
- 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.
by Already__Taken
1 subcomments
- The Tesco premium/super e5 is so much cheaper than everyone else I'm actually pretty sceptical of it.
- Cheapest stations look very off, to me.
by tuwtuwtuwtuw
1 subcomments
- 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.
- this is one of the coolest most random things ive seen. idk why this resonated with me so much ahahah
by peterdrohan
1 subcomments
- bros server crashed
by failure_arch
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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