GasMeUp

Saves you money on gas by finding the cheapest stations near you. On the highway it scans 50 miles of exits ahead so you know when to stop. No ads or sponsored stations. Just an honest answer.

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Inspiration

I realized I had some bad fill-up habits. The fuel light comes on, and I'm searching for the nearest station.

The apps I downloaded to fix this showed me a map full of pins and left the math to me. None of them counted what it costs to drive to a station. Loyalty discounts pulled me toward expensive stations, so I couldn't tell if I was actually saving money. The best-known gas app felt outdated, full of ads and engagement bloat, and I'd stopped trusting its prices. With prices swinging and endless tips, tricks and rewards programs, it's hard to know what you're really saving on gas.

So I did the research. Simply finding the cheapest station near you saves more than almost every loyalty program. And the most overlooked way to save is avoiding the desperate fill-up. On US-101 in California, one of my highway scans found stations more than $1.50 a gallon apart. Take the wrong exit there and you pay over $20 extra on a single tank.

I wanted an honest app that shows me the best station to fill up, anywhere, anytime, on the move, and fast.

What it does

This app scans the gas stations in your area, then presents you the "Best Pick". Your local price spread is shown, and your true savings are based on the local average price. You can quickly browse all the stations scanned, filter for Top Tier gas, apply existing rewards and cashback to your savings calculations.

GasMeUp's killer feature that no other app has is Highway Mode. It detects the road you're driving on, and a single tap scans every station along the road, 50 miles ahead, helping you avoid desperate fill-ups at price-gouged stations. It tells you which stations are worth the wait. You make the most informed choice to help you save the most money.

The best way to save money on gas is to buy an EV. The next best way is to find the cheapest station. GasMeUp makes it easy to do that every time.

How we built it

I'm a learning designer, full-time caregiver, working on fun projects at night. I built GasMeUp solo with Claude Code, test-first, one small slice at a time, with a written decision record for every architecture call. All UI designed by hand in Figma.

  • React Native and Expo (TypeScript) for iOS and Android from day one
  • Supabase: Postgres, Edge Functions, scheduled jobs, row-level security
  • Google Places for live station prices and station details, Google Maps for the map, OpenStreetMap for highway geometry, EIA weekly data for price trends
  • RevenueCat for subscriptions on both stores
  • OneSignal for push notifications, driven by RevenueCat webhooks and a weekly price-trend job
  • Home screen widgets on both platforms (SwiftUI on iOS)
  • 1,860 app tests, about 350 server tests, and over-the-air updates through EAS

Challenges we ran into

The price data I started with wasn't mine to use. The regional averages I had built on turned out to be licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. I pulled them out before launch and rebuilt those screens on my own scan averages and public EIA data.

Every scan costs real money. The official price source can't be cached across users, so a free tier would be a pure loss. That's why GasMeUp is a paid app, and it's also why it can promise no ads, no sponsored stations and no data selling.

Knowing which road you're on is harder than it sounds. Map data for a straight freeway can have points more than half a mile apart, so a car driving perfectly down the middle read as "off the road" a third of the time. Measuring distance to the road itself instead of the nearest point fixed it. Two-way roads drawn as a single line needed their own fix.

A silent bug took out the widget for every new user. One change removed the only code that saved a user's region, so the widget sat on "Building your price view" for seven weeks. Nobody complained. I found it while chasing an unrelated report. Version 1.1.0 fixes it by working out the region from the user's own scans.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It's live, and strangers pay for it. GasMeUp went live on Google Play on Aug 2 and the App Store on Aug 6. 60 people have passed a hard paywall, in 37 metro areas, and most of them live nowhere near me.
  • It works on roads I've never driven. Since late July, 20 subscribers have run more than 100 Highway Mode scans, on highways in at least 13 states.
  • People find it without me. I stopped all promotion for three and a half weeks to build 1.1.0, and 16 new subscribers arrived anyway, with no campaign or link behind any of them.

What we learned

Building it. Let the data change the idea. GasMeUp started in May as an app that would tell you the best day to buy gas. In California prices didnt cycle as much as I expected throughout the week, so timing gave almost nothing. The spread between stations a few miles apart was the real money, so the product flipped from "when" to "where".

Choosing tools. There's a tool for everything, and comparing them can take longer than building. What got me unstuck was asking one question per tool: does it fit the decision in front of me right now?

Shipping it. Getting an app into the stores is its own project: review notes, privacy labels, listings in ten languages, and consoles where "saved" doesn't mean "sent". Twice I filled in a store page, saved it, and found days later it had never gone live. And trial starts are a vanity number. What matters is who pays after the trial, and about a third of my annual trials have turned into paid years.

Finding people. The most fun I had was interviewing drivers at gas stations to learn about their habits and validate my app. Reddit worked when I gave people something useful: a map of where gas is structurally cheaper in San Jose drew about 12K views, and my biggest week, 15 people through the paywall, came right after my launch posts. Making video content was humbling. The steadiest channel turned out to be the store listing itself. App Store search impressions more than doubled between late August and mid-September, and that's where people kept finding me when I wasn't posting.

What's next for GasMeUp

  • Saved commutes. People asked for this in my launch thread: save your daily route and get a morning heads-up with the cheapest stop on it.
  • A savings tally. A running total of what GasMeUp has saved you, fill-up by fill-up.
  • Highway Mode on the lock screen. A Live Activity on iPhone, so the next good exit shows without opening the app.
  • Canada, the first market outside the US.
  • Content, a lot of fun content

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