An independent developer has built a site that polls price data from every UK petrol station every ten minutes, covering roughly 7,700 locations over a three‑month period. The information comes from the publicly mandated UK Fuel Finder scheme, which station operators must update within half an hour. No government agency, retailer, or the CMA directly runs the platform. Data refreshes automatically, no manual input.

Because price changes are legally required to be reported within 30 minutes, the dataset offers near‑real‑time insight into regional fuel cost fluctuations. Researchers can now correlate price movements with events such as refinery outages or policy shifts, while consumers gain a transparent view of where discounts appear. The site stores and analyses the raw feed without altering any figures. Such granularity was previously only available to industry analysts.

The project demonstrates how open‑government licences can empower hobbyist engineers to create public‑service tools at scale. By aggregating data that the Competition and Markets Authority enforces, the developer sidesteps commercial APIs and delivers a free resource for anyone tracking fuel economics. Its success may inspire similar watchdog services in other regulated markets. Other sectors could replicate this open‑data model quickly.