App to find cheaper petrol launches in Australia

Petrol stations around Australia will have to smarten up. Launching nationally in Australia Monday, the app GasBuddy allows users to report and compare petrol prices around their location, and hopefully, find a better deal.

Available free on iOS and Android, GasBuddy has joined apps like stock-trading platform Acorn in choosing Australia as its first launch market outside north America. 

The app relies on crowdsourced data to supply price points at petrol stations around the country.  GasBuddy users are encouraged to confirm or report petrol prices on the app as they drive by service stations, earning points and potentially winning $100 in free fuel in a daily draw.

Nic Moulis, country manager of GasBuddy Australia, told Mashable Australia there was a lot of work to be done making the app intuitive for an Australian audience. "There are hurdles around product type, the way prices are notified. We talk in litres, they talk in gallons," he said. "It was [about] making sure that user experience was right, day one."

GasBuddy is no doubt banking on Australians understanding the American term for petrol, with the app rolling out without a name change. 

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Founded as a website in 2000 by Dustin Coupal and Jason Toews, the app has been downloaded 56 million times since its release in 2009, and the company says it has 15 million monthly active users. 

As it is free, GasBuddy sells native advertising and real-time price data sets, among other things. In the U.S., one of their biggest customers are car companies, Moulis said, who use the data to feed their on-board fuel information systems.

Given its reliance on crowdsourcing, the app's success depends on whether Australians are interested enough to report prices. "In the U.S., the crowd is spotting a price at a service station on average 16 times a day," Moulis said. "Across the U.S. [that adds up] to in excess of 2 million price spots a day." 

While Australia has a much smaller population than the U.S., Moulis said he was comfortable the crowdsourcing model would work locally. "We've got 6,500 [petrol station] sites across the country," he said. "A good hit for us, at full usage, would be about 10 price spots for the site per day. That would be 65,000 users across the country." While his aim is to add far more than 65,000 users to the platform in Australia, he believes the number is readily achievable.

The app also uses algorithms to weed out bad prices, examining how far the person reporting is from the station, comparing the report to average prices and also the credibility of the reporter. "The algorithm learns as it goes," he said. "As you start to build reports in the system ... it starts to trust you."

The app is also fed by outside data sets, including retailer price reporting. In December, the NSW government announced it would push service station operators to disclose their prices in real-time, but Moulis said while such information could be useful, crowdsourcing would remain a faster and more responsive method of collecting price data.

"Once you get the consumer engaged, the model in the U.S. has shown they become quite passionate and concerned that people are being told the truth," Moulis said.

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