UK Fuel Price Intelligence

119

ttheazureguy about 5 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on fuelinsight.co.uk

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theazureguy•about 5 hours ago

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.

appreciatorBus•about 4 hours ago

Another insightful way to look at this is to include gasoline spot market data as a comparison.

I kept hearing about the vast profits of gas stations, so one day I started a spreadsheet of my gas purchases and kept it going over 10 years. When I tried lining up the graph of what I have actually paid per litre with a spot market graph, after converting for currency, units, taxes etc, they were almost identical, indicating extremely slim margins, if any. Yes there were differences, places in the graph where stations had likely made money on my purchase, but there were just as many where they likely lost money, unless I also stepped inside to but a snack.

jacquesm•about 4 hours ago

You are correct. Non-chain gas stations often make only as little as one or two cents per liter, and that's before you look at pump maintenance, inspections, periodical tank replacements/upgrades/liners and other costs.

Manned stations really need that shop otherwise they'd go bankrupt.

Chains make a bit more money but mostly because they can play longer games with stock and options on much larger volume buys.

Source: former gas station owner.

spockz•about 3 hours ago

And yet I see in earnings that companies like BP and Shell make record profits over increased gas prices. How come that they do profit but the station holders not? Are shell/bp increasing the margin harder and eating the station’s lunch?

theazureguy•about 4 hours ago

Good shout. DESNZ publishes weekly wholesale rack prices and they are OGL, so there is no barrier there. The interesting bit isn't just showing the gap; it's the propagation lag. Wholesale spikes and pump prices follow within days. Wholesale drops and pump prices take their time. That asymmetry is basically what I built this dataset to measure. Adding the wholesale series as a reference line is on the list.

christina97•about 2 hours ago

You’re absolutely right!

gruez•about 3 hours ago

>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.

theazureguy•about 3 hours ago

yeah that's fair, without wholesale rack prices as a baseline you can't really isolate station behaviour from what's happening upstream.

gruez•about 2 hours ago

>without wholesale rack prices as a baseline

The US government publishes data on this (eg. https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/). The UK government might have something similar. Barring that, you can use Brent crude as a proxy.

fredoralive•about 5 hours ago

For the "supermarket saving", did you include Asda in the supermarket pool, or as a general pool? They seem to be rather less price competitive than other supermarkets, I'd presumably because of the recentish private equity takeover involving petrol station operator Euro Garages meaning they've kinda opted out of the petrol price war (they're hardly likely to want to undercut their existing forecourts).

Although the other recent private equity takeover of Morrisons led to some sort of deal with Motor Fuels Group to operate their petrol stations (but no ownership stuff in this case?), but they're seemingly still being competitive with Sainsbury's and Tesco's.

theazureguy•about 4 hours ago

Yeah Asda is in there. I match on brand name directly rather than the API's is_supermarket flag because that flag is all over the place (loads of Asda stations don't have it set). So it explicitly checks for Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Co-op, Costco.

Your point about post-PE Asda is interesting, I've noticed it too. If you want to see how they compare individually you can check the brands page on the site, shows each supermarket chain as its own line. Pretty easy to split the supermarket aggregate out per brand too, would probably show Asda creeping back towards the independents since the takeover. Might add that.

lotsofpulp•about 2 hours ago

It is well established that Costco sells Top Tier brand fuel at zero margins, so you could have just tracked Costco prices. In the US, Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons also sell fuel at near zero margins, but it’s not Top Tier branded.

yzydserd•about 3 hours ago

> 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.

157p/L national average is about 8 USD/G.

isoprophlex•about 4 hours ago

If only this wasn't hosted on azure, we'd be able to actually look at the data

varispeed•about 3 hours ago

I thought cloud was supposed to be an answer to sudden surges in traffic. /s

dspillett•about 3 hours ago

It is, up to the point where payment limits hit, or things are not set to auto-scale for that reason, or the project just isn't designed in a way to actually take advantage of the scaling (in which case you might be better off on your own/rented servers which will be much cheaper than one of the big clouds, unless you don't want the faf of managing backups & other admin and freedom from that is worth the extra cost).

callamdelaney•about 3 hours ago

Microslopinator strikes again

hntiz•10 minutes ago

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.

johannes1234321•about 3 hours ago

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/

xp84•39 minutes ago

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.

mootothemax•about 1 hour ago

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.

badc0ffee•about 1 hour ago

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.

traceroute66•about 1 hour ago

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

whynotmaybe•about 2 hours ago

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

multjoy•about 1 hour ago

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.

Already__Taken•about 3 hours ago

The Tesco premium/super e5 is so much cheaper than everyone else I'm actually pretty sceptical of it.

theazureguy•about 3 hours ago

checked the db, tesco e5 is 163.8p average across 292 stations in the last 21 days. Worth spot checking a few specific stations if it still looks off to you.

tuwtuwtuwtuw•about 1 hour ago

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.

peterdrohan•about 4 hours ago

bros server crashed

morkalork•about 4 hours ago

Well they did call themselves the azure guy

theazureguy•about 4 hours ago

haha not quite, db was struggling under the load for a few minutes. b1ms postgres doesn't love 6k requests in 30 mins.

firefoxd•about 3 hours ago

A 30 second memcached/redis/etc goes a long way when sharing on HN. You go from 6k db hits to 60 hits in 30 minutes. Worked for me since 2013 [0].

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request

GordonS•about 4 hours ago

Those tiny b1ms VMs are absolutely pitiful (long time Azure sufferer here). It's crazy how little compute and memory Azure give you for so much money.