CheapestFuel.ie

Get the cheapest fuel near you. Always.

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Inspiration

As college students who are also newly car owners, we were motivated through the desire to get the cheapest price possible (and a small hint of spite). Fuel stations deliberately engage in anti competitive practices by attempting to align themselves all around the same price point. They rarely offer information about fuel prices on websites, and will more often than not refuse to provide prices over the phone. Their intention is obvious: by the time you drive there, they hope you won’t be bothered to look for cheaper places.

In the interest of helping people save money, and reduce carbon emissions by directing users straight to the fuel station with the cheapest price, we created CheapestFuel.ie

What it does

CheapestFuel crowd-sources data from our users. Whenever they pass by or use a fuel station, they can upload a photo of the current prices being charged there, and will earn a portion of the subscription they pay to sign up back. If they upload sufficient prices during the month of the subscription, they’ll earn another month of use totally free.

Crowdsourcing of fuel prices is not a new concept, but it’s largely failed to clunky unresponsive UI and, most of all, a failure to provide users with an incentive to refresh the data. User’s aren’t going to bother to upload fresh data while re-filling their car if there’s nothing in it for them – we change that.

How we built it

Our project is built atop NextJS as a full stack framework, with Supabase powering our PostgreSQL database and Better-Auth handling user authentication.

The mapping functionality, as well as anti-abuse is provided by the Google Maps API. OCR for fuel price uploads is performed using ChatGPT 4o.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was the initial UI design, trying to figure out what sort of interface would be most suitable to convey the information we had to our users. We settled on using the Google Maps API to display a map of where the user is, and to populate the area with all the known fuel stations.

We also had to prevent malicious users abusing the app by providing malicious inputs. To ameliorate this, we replaced manual entering of fuel prices by ChatGPT powered image OCR, which accurately reads in prices from images of fueling station price towers. It also allows us to filter out users who are providing images which are not displaying fuel prices. We also implemented a safeguard that ensures users are actually at the fuel station they are uploading prices for – they are prompted to upload an image straight from their camera, rather than one from the gallery.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within the time constraints of the hackathon, we successfully produced a production grade application leveraging several unfamiliar APIs: better auth, google maps, and the OpenAI API. We were also able to discover a bug with the OpenAI API, which we were able to route to the appropriate engineer and get resolved in under an hour (s/o Geoffrey & Mohammed!).

We also managed to get some early sales from people we know, cementing the potential of the idea! We have €15 MRR!

Lastly, we spent a good deal of time meeting new people and making friends that we hope will last far past the hackathon :)

What we learned

We’re fans of coding ASAP. As soon as we have an idea, we try to cobble together a working prototype that displays its merits. Like a potter slowly slowly molds a mis-shapen lump of clay, gradually, into a beautiful vase, we too like slowly refactoring code until it reaches its apex – it allows us to move quickly and produce good results.

What's next for CheapestFuel.ie

While we’re proud of what we’ve built so far, there’s plenty of room for expansion and improvement. Our next steps will focus on refining the app, increasing user engagement, and expanding our market reach.

While fuel prices are our current focus, we see potential in expanding the platform to cover other fluctuating costs that impact drivers, such as toll prices, EV charging rates, and parking fees.

Currently, CheapestFuel.ie is web-based, but we would like to develop dedicated iOS and Android apps for a smoother user experience. Push notifications will be integrated to alert users when fuel prices drop at nearby stations. Lastly, this app will be made compatible with Android Auto, Apple CarPlay and other Car OS which are provided by manufacturers like BMW.

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