A couple of interesting observations while building it:
Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.
I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.
I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.
There’s also an /insights page with some aggregated stats that genuinely surprised me: https://petrolmate.co.uk/insights
Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.
Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?
1. filter slider, decreasing on price, to see places closest to me disappearing 2. on the left panel, when I click on a low priced area, it should highlight it on the map, so I know where it is. The 'go to pump' button, I guess is good. but I'd only want to commit to gmaps if I already know that it's a reasonable place for me to. be going.
Note, in brave on linux I can't see the map. Console has a lot of 401 on stadiamaps. But works great in chrome.
But they also need a little WebUI for stations to manually update prices, since small stations won't have a programmer on staff to do this stuff.
I wouldn't look forward to having to do that every time I changed prices!
I wonder how many small independent stations are there these days? Almost every one I see is either in a supermarket, a big chain like Esso, or a smaller chain like Harvest.
(no comments there yet though!)
Here in Germany private corporations provide APIs for this. Google maps straight up tells you the price at nearby stations.
Maybe the UK government should focus on things such as their crumbling infrastructure, their almost non existent GDP growth or getting rid of their knife murderer and rapist population?
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...
They certainly love spending taxpayer money on nothing don't they.
aka competition
This is a funny take, because we ostensibly assume 'perfect information' when we extol the virtues of capitalism. It would appear the government is supporting capitalism with this particular initiative...
Until this we assume marginality holds true and price dispersion has a benefit in society that we unwittingly enable.
but travel around 5miles and it's typically 5-9p cheaper
no way can this make it worse for me - hopefully people will travel to punish the garages.
People who are price sensitive can discover cheaper alternatives more easily; others still won't bother
This is not a new sites. Its making data more available so sites and apps will have more accurate data. This is most likely to benefit those who are willing to trade convenience for lower costs.
"An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but it is hard to buy one inch of time with one inch of gold"
Which always says to me that its not worth it just use the quickest option
Take the example drcongo posted:
"Yesterday I had to drive to a nearby town, just 20 minutes away, and noticed that every single petrol station there was a good 5p per litre cheaper than my town. I might plug this into a map."
Assume he uses 30 litres a week (high end of average UK usage) that's £1.50 per week saving but assume the extra miles use half a litre, that takes about 65 p off the saving (ill not go into wear and tear) over 30 years of work 50 weeks a year this means a saving of £1,275 over 30 years ... sounds a lot but
20 mins away - this assumes 40 minutes per week over 50 weeks is 2000 minutes, and over 30 years 60000 minutes. Now assume you are awake for 16 hours a day this equates to 62.5 days of free time - more than two months of awake time
so as the saying goes... which would you prefer £1,275 saving or 62.5 days of time
But it's still useful to know about price variation so that you can plan ahead. I regularly drive past several different petrol stations, and if I know that one of them is usually cheaper or usually more expensive then I choose to use or avoid it, or to decide that I'll fill up tomorrow when I'm going that way rather than today at a more expensive one.
And that'd be more useful built into satnav, so that if I know I have to fill up somewhere along my route then I can pick the cheapest place, since there's no real time cost to any of the options compared to each other.
It's interesting running the numbers though. e.g. if it only take 10 minutes to get cheaper fuel, how much cheaper does it need to be for your time to be worth more than the UK minimum wage (£12.21 for adults over 21)
based on my maths (from above calculations) it needs to be about 7p per litre cheaper to justify the extra 10 minutes and for your time to be worth more, per hour, than the minimum wage.
More information is always good.
However, I think (and hope) the point of this service is that by being public, it'll drive prices down for drivers.
I drive 10 miles round-trip once per month to save what I guesstimate is £5 on a tank of fuel, then spend £100-300 in the Costco store while I'm there. I'm not the target audience, but I hope that for those who drive regularly, or for a living, this can help route them to where they can get the best prices as they're passing by.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, it's common for pump prices to vary significantly even within a small radius. But they're all on https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/ so you can see what the price is ahead of time.
If it's 14c cheaper per litre (coming up for 10%) to go 500m one direction vs 500m another direction, which one are you going to choose?
Just want to say, nothing wrong with doing that. Everyone has different priorities. I just hope most wont have to do it.
Besides, with a smaller tank, you'll make more trips to tank it, and also have less choice to go to gas stations that are further away but have cheaper price. Then again it becomes a question of "Do I want more time or more money?", back to square one :)
Edit: Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the fuel pump use fuel itself as a coolant or something? Never investigated myself, but some car-knower once told me that running the tank on low always isn't good for the fuel pump, or something like that. If that's true, running with 10% of the fuel would mean more maintenance too, potentially removing any savings in the first place.
Ultimately how much is your time worth? in the example given drcongo's time is worth £1.28 an hour.
but if enough people use their time to go to the cheaper station further away, then they may force the closer garage to to reduce their price
either that or the close garage goes out of business and the one further away puts up the price because they can.
but still, it can be more complex
edit: My annual milage is actually very low, so it definitely wouldn't be worth it, but I appreciated the maths either way.
Shopping around for the fuel of an EV you can do from a web browser, oh hey, Octopus have a good deal for night charging, click click done.
I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this.
Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol because it was ~5 times more expensive than the local pharmacy brand that was out of stock. (£2.25 vs £0.49 for 16 500mg tablets.) I'd usually agree with him but he was out of paracetamol and has been advised by his doctor to take 2x500mg a day and there was no viable nearby alternative.
A digression but for that generation (those born in 1940s/50s) that grew up with rationing I think it is hardwired into their brain to try and minimise the cost of so many things, but with lots of random exceptions. Later on that day he ordered an extra drink but decided he was too full once it had arrived so he left it. So he was worried about spending an extra £1.76 on paracetamol but not about spending £7 on a pint he didn't drink.
Many people decide what petrol station to use based on simply how close it is, what kind of shop is attached to it (and the bits of British snobbery around that), whether it also sells whatever else they want (bread, milk, beer, etc), or even whether it is easy to drive in and out of.
https://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/
Nice to see the UK come onboard.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/report-your-fuel-prices-and-fore...
So looks as though the requirement to report was only just introduced, hence the considerable missing data.
Edit: BBC reporting here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o
Yeah. It was formally announced in the November 2025 budget and launched today.
Companies do not understand "must" unless it's accompanied by a proven threat of sanctions that outweighs the profits made by breaching the regulation. The GDPR is a good example of plenty of "musts" and theoretical fines but lax enforcement means it's always more profitable to breach it than comply.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/DE/Aufgaben/Markttransparenz...
Definitely very different.
https://www.fuelcheck.nsw.gov.au/app/FuelPrice/ByLocation?la...
Then you need the integration into home assistant for your local options.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/nsw_fuel_station/
And an app for ease of use when you're out of your local area.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.gov.nsw.one...
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/nsw-fuelcheck/id1266569551
How does it affect things across the economy for fuel purchase? Haven't seen a study. It would incentive-ise price cutting to increase sales, especially by the independent operators, by essentially advertising the lower pricing for free, is my guess.
https://www.developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk/apis-ifr/in...
It doesn't mention any filters beyond batch number and effective start date. They're definitely storing the lat-lon information though, so it would be nice to do area-based queries, especially if you're building an app with a map view.
Neither the pilot nor the current API appears to include all fuel stations, but at least they provide (hopefully) more reliable updates from the ones that do.
I'd been playing with the pilot study data and set up FuelBelly to aggregate and compare https://fuelbelly.com/explore?lat=51.50740713124398&lng=-0.1.... (doesn't include the API updates, yet...)
A quick play with the API, the information responses (opening times, addresses etc.) doesn't appear to be working, I just get a 500 (HTML not JSON) response. But the price calls are working, and I'm glad this is being pushed forward post-pilot.
Preview:
https://bf31ed2a-ec85-460a-a503-fa9bf86bf63b.paged.net/
Source:
https://github.com/markwylde/uk-fuel-price-map
You have to download the CSV manually from the gov.uk link.
If you live on the Irish border, you'll have a choice between getting your petrol on the UK side, or the Irish side. For about 20 years, petrol was cheaper on the Irish side, causing a bunch of petrol stations to spring up just over the border, attracting drivers from the other side with cheap prices and good exchange rates.
In the last 10 years or so, the position has reversed. Petrol is now roughly cheaper on the UK side of the border, or at least not worth making a special trip for.
There's even a petrol station in Belleek mentioned here[1] that straddles the border and apparently has or had pumps on both sides.
[1]: https://www.impartialreporter.com/news/25653110.border-filli...
This might be a slight missing woods/trees moment but that aside - there is precious little open geospatial data in the uk that establishes see this dot here? That’s a fuel station, that is. That dot there? Oooooh no, that there’s a pub.
The uk govts of the time managed to hand both the address data and the this-is-what-it-is data off to separate commercial enterprises in the name of privatisation, and I genuinely believe it was by accident as it’s… err… quite a niche topic of knowledge.
So anything - anything! - that brings some of that back and truly open to the public is very much welcomed.
There's also 'Gaspy' which is really a NZ app that was very popular in NZ (I used to live there) where people submit and confirm prices, but in the UK there aren't that many users (hasn't got critical mass), so there are often no prices or things are very out-of-date.
In the US gasoline short distance price variations are ridiculous. I've seen it where one station was $3.50/gal and another station on the same main road just a 30 second drive away was $4.30/gal. These two stations almost always have a large difference like that. This kind of large difference over a small distance is common all over the country.
Yet a surprisingly large number of people will always choose the more expensive station, even if they know about both of them (and the other stations with prices consistently in between that are also about equally close). There's nothing about the layout of the town and traffic patterns that make the expensive station more convenient, or make it easy to find. All these stations are about equally busy so it is not like the expensive one is faster. The less expensive one even has a way better convenience store.
This is one of the higher gas price states and people are constantly complaining about how much it costs to fill up, and when I ask complainers about where they buy gas it is often the expensive stations.
Many of them think that if they don't buy at the expensive station it will be bad for their car. Different brands add different detergents and additives that fight clogging and build up of deposits in your engine and fuel system.
However in 1995 the US got a federal standard that all gas has to meet, and then in 2004 several major car makers developed a standard they called "Top Tier" which is about 20 times more effective than the federal standard. Most major gas brands now sell only gas that is certified to meet the Top Tier standard.
Most testing has found that going for something beyond Top Tier doesn't really have a significant benefit for most people. For nearly everyone the best approach is:
(1) Avoid gas that is not at least Top Tier. Generally the only places that sell gas that isn't at least Top Tier are grocery store brands and maybe some convenience store brands. The savings with those brands is usually only a couple or so cents a gallon compared to the least expensive Top Tier brands (ARCO, Costco) and your car will perform better (including improved mpg) and need less maintenance.
(2) Buy the least expensive Top Tier or above gas that is convenient. You aren't going to notice any difference in performance or maintenance if you pay extra for some brand's particular proprietary blend.
Edit: after asking AI about this I would say the CSV is pretty useless as a comprehensive source of info on UK fuel prices.
Seriously?
I thought HN readers would have more sense than that.
I don't know if your experience is from British people but it looks like they just didn't have the mean to effectively compare fuel prices.
Once they do, there is a significant part of the British drivers that will most likely be using it.
We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au
I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of 10-15%, occasionally 20%.
In a country where fuel is as expensive as it is in the UK, people are going to use that.
You spend more in by fuel driving there more often. As well as wasting your own time.
Just google "gas station pumped water" to see all the local news articles about this sort of thing.
https://www.koco.com/article/drivers-oklahoma-furious-after-...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-station-pumps-ga-water/
https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/lake-county/mentor-w...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/nevada-gas-station-pumps-golden...
A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).
https://www.petrolprices.com/news/garage-sells-petrol-dilute...
UK advice is to avoid drinking more than 14 units (think a shot, a small beer or a small glass of wine = 1 unit) whilst taking paracetamol.
https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/paracetamol-for-adults/common-q...
Sadly many people feel that because they are sick, they need to spend as much money as possible because that would give them best shot at getting healthly.
I once asked a guy "why don't you buy that cheap medicine. Its the same and will save you money" but they were like "naa. Its cheap. What would be inside it. I need to pay top money for best medicine"
- "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon"
- "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels"
- "The condition of a station's underground storage tanks affects quality"
- "For the best engine performance and longevity, choosing Top Tier-certified gasoline is generally recommended."
More importantly you know that pretty much any fuel being sold in a mainstream place in the UK is going to meet the minimum national standards which are perfectly fine for the vast majority of cars on the road.
Anyone that has a car that requires E5 rather than E10, or higher octane fuel may need to buy the associated "premium" fuels, but these are just not necessary for the vast majority of cars on the road. But we're not talking about the premium fuels here, we're talking about two garages selling pretty much the same thing for quite different prices and preying on some people's FUD.
Current car says: 93, at a minimum 91. I don't have 93 here. So 91 it is.
But going the other way is just wasteful.
Looking at that document, this regulation is dead on arrival. Enforcement is contingent on the aggregator noticing the price discrepancy, giving the seller many opportunities to rectify the situation without a penalty (if we assume every step gives them 30 days to respond, we're looking at ~5 months before a financial penalty becomes possible), and even then, the regulatory "may" impose a financial penalty, meaning it isn't even guaranteed.
You know what would immediately resolve this problem and prevent non-compliance? A reporting system where any citizen can submit evidence of a price discrepancy and upon validation gets a 1k payout from the government who then recovers it via a fine. This would make it sustainable for anyone to act as an "auditor" or even do this as a business.
Of course, the reason it isn't done this way is because it would be too effective, where as this current iteration gives the appearance that something is being done while having no impact in practice.
Some people seem to think that spending less at the pump means your saving money, but to save money you need to drive less. They religiously drive on £10-20 fuel stops.
My ex wife was convinced she spends less on fuel by putting less in a time, she even earnt more than me.
> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.
As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.
https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/EN/Tasks/markettransparencyu...
this is the only reason I use waze!
Unless you mean that it has the speed limit too, if so I agree that it’s a must have, along with the speed camera alerts.
7p cheaper for 10 minutes works out at about minimum wage if you're buying 30 litres, but with a bigger car you could easily be buying twice that, which works out much better.
Although of course you also need to factor in how much fuel you burn driving to the cheaper place, and the extra wear and depreciation on the car. If you take the HMRC standard rate of 45p/mile (which was meant to cover all of that kind of thing, but hasn't been updated for years) then even going a few miles out of your way quickly ends up costing more than it's likely to save.
A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
Only 7p?
Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.
According to the live feed at https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/ I see:
Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).
Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.
Spending an extra £10 once or twice a year when driving a few hundred miles and thus needing to fill up at a motorway is nothing. Chances are I’m spending that much on an overpriced coffee when I do that anyway.
Ironically I had to do a small topup on the M4 today, and yeah, that was mad!
Out of curiosity how does that work (never been in a situation where I have to worry about minimal fuel purchases) - does the pump simply round up the price to the minimum when done, or did you actually have to dispense extra fuel, either into a jerrycan or donating it to someone else's car otherwise the pump would not actually finalize the transaction?
A google seems to show that it is because the pumps are not certified to be accurate below 2 litres (or 5 litres for higher flow rate pumps like the HGV diesel pumps) so anything below this is at your own risk.
Another way of thinking about it is you have no right to complain if you think you've been short fueled if you don't dispense the minimum stated.
Under that amount, you are likely paying much more per litre.
ie you're asserting there is zero variance in quality?
OP wrote lower quality, not low quality
It's the reverse of "this one is more expensive therefore it must be better" without any evidence at all that it is the case.
Companies are permitted to add additives etc but whether that meaningfully improves quality I'm not sure
The main issue is that it risks pulling detritus from the very bottom of the fuel tank, usually a bigger issue in diesels and I suspect less of a problem these days.
I know very little about these things, but my understanding was always that any form of liquid pump uses the liquid itself as coolant to some extent.
On a related note, my car has a fuel heater, to pre-heat the Diesel before it hits the engine, I assume this is typical in modern cars, but using the fuel as a coolant would presumably contribute positively to this desire for warmer fuel entering the cylinders.
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o#comments
Edit: Petrolprices was founded in 2005 (!) [2]
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
Maybe it's me that's weird. No, surely that can't be right... :)
Same here.
Sometimes even on the A413...