Announcements

What’s coming up for March

No new major features will be announced this month as we work on improving the quality of data site-wide; that means Suburb positioning and radius, reporting and exclusion of broken/corrupt stations and improving feedback systems.

The stragglers from past months will carry over to this month.

New features

  • [x] Refresh fuel excerpt for Cities at 5:00pm when tomorrow’s prices are available as in WA
  • [x] Add price heat mapping to the State template
  • [..] Add price heat mapping to the Brand template
  • [  ] Set the daily average price for towns/cities independantly where local station data is available (e.g. WA, NT, NSW, QLD)
  • [  ] Show the average daily fuel price on the Fuel brand template
  • [  ] Finish the Small Detailed Embed and Map Embed Widgets
  • [  ] Add Suburb support to all Widgets
  • [..] Add reporting feature to City and Station templates to raise data issues
  • [  ] Overlay the current average daily price with current per-station prices to see what stations have priced their fuel types above/below regional averages
  • [  ] Add forecasting of tomorrow price and two days from now prices for cities based on known high and low historical prices
  • [  ] Add fuzzy matching for mispelled Suburbs and towns/cities in search
  • [  ] History controls for fuel stations to see last week, last month and all time matching the history controls of fuel types
  • [  ] AMP site support with Google Maps and Charts functionality
  • [..] Build out an API for localised fuel price data
  • [..] Put the website through AppPresser and release to the Google Play and App Store marketplaces
  • [..] Add My Account facilities to manage your vehicle preferences, preferred fuel type and favourite stations and/or regions
  • [  ] Add site facilites to fuel stations from official sources (e.g. AdBlue availability, etc.)
  • [  ] Add fuel excerpt for Diesel and Premium Diesel fuel types using long-term pricing data (Diesel and Premium Diesel do not have typical weekly/monthly cycles)

Fixes

  • [..] Validate Suburb Lat/Long positions against a new dataset with better accuracy
  • [  ] Identify and redirect duplicate fuel stations at the same location to the original station that is being maintained
  • [..] Identify non-crowdfunded data sources for fuel stations in Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT
  • [  ] Improve the fuel price trigger detection linked to the low pricing e-mail notification
  • [..] Populate Google Maps Place ID for thousands of suburbs
  • [..] Populate Google Maps Place ID for thousands of outstanding stations
  • [  ] Validate Station price details by comparing against multiple data sources where possible
  • [  ] Re-introduce road safety messages with new Ad platform showing relevant messages based on known location

Please keep hitting the feedback buttons and leave a comment where you identify problems with pages, feedback is taken seriously and is often actioned on the spot. 🙂

Letters to the editor from February

At the start of each month we respond to positive and negative feedback collected from the past month. We rely on this feedback to better this site so please hit the feedback buttons at the bottom of each page where you think we can do better.

Here’s some of the feedback received in February.

Great for doing my BAS

Nice one! If we can make any changes to better accomodate this use please let us know in the comments on this Post.

With the graph, if a figure for the average could be provided for the timeframe that’s being filtered, that would be most helpful. Averages will change if the period of time being used.

Thanks for this suggestion! If you can drop any comments below in this Post or links to graphs showing this we can use that as a reference guide. Adding a simple moving average based on the current graph view is easy enough but we want to be sure we’re all on the same page.

I think I dropped my credit card outside the Rutherglen service station but the phone no is incorrect. Heather

We hope you found your credit card Heather! We’ve gone ahead and updated our phone number for Metro Petroleum Rutherglen as well as set a task to sync any phone number changes weekly via the Google Maps Place API. 🙂

STILL WAITING FOR YOU TO HAVE METRO FUEL STATION MIAMI PRICE

METRO FUEL MIAMI STILL NOT BEING SHOWN?

MIAMI METRO FUEL NOT ON LIST MOUNTAIN VIEW AVE MIAMI

MIAMI VILLAGE SHOPPING CENTRE FUEL

Message received. Unfortunately while Metro Fuel Miami is included in the Fuel Prices Queensland (FPQ) dataset and listed on our site this station is yet to submit a price feed; the grace period for fuel stations to get onboard is 21 April, 2019 (Easter) so they still have some time to organise their price feed.

A few things we can immediately do better is:

  • [  ] make it easier for site visitors is to get in contact with DNRME so that they’re aware of currently non-participating fuel stations
  • [x] add stations without fuel prices to the All Stations view on the City and Suburb templates; these stations show as grey map markers and are listed in the “Inactive / offline fuel stations near XYZ” section
  • [  ] improve our feedback system so that site visitors can receive replies from us if they choose to provide their e-mail address.

Be more accurate with your readings

To have a list of Fuel stations s and their prices. Considering there are lot less now. Hofm radio station does a very good job in relating fuel prices, but does not happen regularly unfortunately. Bennetts would have to be the most expensive all the time.

There is no official data source for retail fuel prices in Tasmania. Due to this there is no quality measure in the listed prices for Tasmania, this limitation affects all fuel price comparison website.

As soon as an official data source is made available by the Tasmanian Government for retail fuel prices (like WA, NSW, NT and QLD have) we’ll tie it in here. Contact your State Government and urge them to get onboard.

Changes for 08/02

Here’s a summary of changes since the last change announcement to FuelPrice Australia.

Added

  • Styling for price band filtering on City template
  • Offline dot image to Suburb template
  • AJAX notice prompt to “Fuel near me” responses
  • Framework for Table Embed widget
  • CSS styling for Custom Google Search
  • CSS styling for Subscribe widget on Announcements section
  • CSS styling on Filter button within Brand template
  • Station filter for identifying Stations without any prices
  • Conditional for WA and ACT City excerpt additions (e.g. start of new pricing cycles in WA, long-price cycles in ACT)
  • Automatic redirect for Stations from Search widget
  • Additional fuel types (91, 95, 98) to automatic redirect from Search widget
  • Station prices to Brands template when a fuel type is selected
  • Total views to City template
  • Fatal PHP error to 500 screen when logged in as Admin
  • Show inactive stations on Suburb template
  • Weekly refresh of QLD station names and brands
  • Error notice for stations with no data at all after a fortnight
  • Notice to Suburb template for Victoria site visitors
  • Fuel price heat mapping to the Frontpage
  • Graph to the QLD reporting page within My Account
  • Styling for Table Embed
  • Styling for leading priced brand notice now with Brand favicon
  • Styling for price band filtering options on City template
  • Action to refresh lowest/highest sites on the City template
  • Action to refresh national fuel station count
  • Monitoring for time taken refreshing data from public sources
  • Admin dashboard monitor for each State regarding uptime
  • Minimum height rules to Graph and Table Embeds
  • Price band filtering options to the City template when viewing all stations
  • Graph to QLD reports showing stations without fuel prices
  • Layout field to iframe generator for Table Embed
  • Graph to About page listing number of monitored fuel stations
  • Google Analytics tracking to Embeds
  • Styling for Table Embed list layout
  • Admin action to remove Publicize Post meta on Posts

Fixed

  • Improved site search widget visibility for mobile users
  • Missing min/max values from State averages chart
  • Refresh of cheapest stations in Table Embed
  • Deprecated use of WP_CLI::line for log
  • Redirect Archives template to Frontpage
  • Indication of number of stations in a City with few fuel stations
  • Redirect /login/ to My Account for logged-in Users
  • Redirect completed Register screen to My Account
  • Hide developer mode notice to non-logged in Users
  • Last updated detail not refreshing for NSW Stations
  • Fuel excerpt triggering high price event after stalling more than 15 days into a price cycle
  • Replaced geolocation for “Fuel near me” from ip-api.com to ipinfo.io

Changed

  • Moved State WP-CLI commands into separate files
  • Moved embed files into separate template files
  • Hide most expensive stations if none found on Suburb template
  • Removed curveType filter from Google Charts (thanks /r/brisbane)
  • Removed regional cities Widget from sidebar (thanks /r/brisbane)
  • Shifted the clock forward an hour for scheduled refreshing of daily City prices

What’s coming up for February

In the past month we added price heat mapping to the National, City and Suburb templates and continue adding new fuel stations. You can now see the number of sites we monitor over time from the About us page.

The stragglers from past months will carry over to this month.

New features

  • [x] Refresh fuel excerpt for Cities at 5:00pm when tomorrow’s prices are available as in WA
  • [x] Scan existing stations for Brand and Name changes
  • [..] Add price heat mapping to the State template
  • [  ] Add price heat mapping to the Brand template
  • [  ] Set the daily average price for towns/cities independantly where local station data is available (e.g. WA, NSW, QLD)
  • [  ] Show the average daily fuel price on the Fuel brand template
  • [  ] Finish the Small Detailed Embed and Map Embed Widgets
  • [x] Add the Table Embed Widget
  • [  ] Add Suburb support to all Widgets
  • [..] Add reporting feature to City and Station templates to raise data issues
  • [  ] Overlay the current average daily price with current per-station prices to see what stations have priced their fuel types above/below regional averages
  • [  ] Add forecasting of tomorrow price and two days from now prices for cities based on known high and low historical prices
  • [  ] Add fuzzy matching for mispelled Suburbs and towns/cities in search
  • [  ] History controls for fuel stations to see last week, last month and all time matching the history controls of fuel types
  • [  ] AMP site support with Google Maps and Charts functionality
  • [..] Build out an API for localised fuel price data
  • [  ] Put the website through AppPresser and release to the Google Play and App Store marketplaces
  • [..] Add My Account facilities to manage your vehicle preferences, preferred fuel type and favourite stations and/or regions
  • [  ] Add site facilites to fuel stations from official sources (e.g. AdBlue availability, etc.)
  • [  ] Add fuel excerpt for Diesel and Premium Diesel fuel types using long-term pricing data (Diesel and Premium Diesel do not have typical weekly/monthly cycles)

Fixes

  • [..] Validate Suburb Lat/Long positions against a new dataset with better accuracy
  • [  ] Identify and redirect duplicate fuel stations at the same location to the original station that is being maintained
  • [..] Identify non-crowdfunded data sources for fuel stations in Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT
  • [  ] Improve the fuel price trigger detection linked to the low pricing e-mail notification
  • [..] Populate Google Maps Place ID for thousands of suburbs
  • [..] Populate Google Maps Place ID for thousands of outstanding stations
  • [  ] Validate Station price details by comparing against multiple data sources where possible
  • [  ] Re-introduce road safety messages with new Ad platform showing relevant messages based on known location

Please keep hitting the feedback buttons and leave a comment where you identify problems with pages, feedback is taken seriously and is often actioned on the spot. 🙂

Letters to the editor from January

At the start of each month we respond to positive and negative feedback collected from the past month. We rely on this feedback to better this site so please hit the feedback buttons at the bottom of each page where you think we can do better.

Here’s some of the feedback received in January.

I suggest if you put where is the service station have the lowest price.

Report Normanton’s fuel pricing. The top servo (BP) Normanton’s fuel was an extremely high $1.73/L. Was not expecting such high prices.

We’ve been keeping an eye on Normanton and why fuel stations recommendations aren’t showing and after some investigation it boiled down to the fuel stations not supplying fuel price information.

There are several fuel stations in Normanton that are listed in our database but there are no historical or current fuel prices stored against them, expect to see these fuel stations listed on our site when their fuel price reported commences before the 1 March, 2019 Queensland legislation deadline.

Helped find the cheapest nearest to me

Mission accomplished!

Negative: EVERYTHING about Costco Marsden Park

Everything? A little more information would go a long way here. What can we do better? Let us know.

Myrtleford has three petrol stations. You have it listed as none. We have two Caltex and a Shell. Currently charging about 20c per litre more than neighbouring towns. We need this information in these price check pages.

provide fuel prices for Sale

This has been fixed as of 14/01, there was an issue in our hourly checking of fuel stations for Suburbs. The Suburb fuel price view has been under active development since the beginning of January so issues like this are expected, thanks for letting us know so we could get it sorted!

No petroleum stations in Huonville??? We have 2!!!

There is no official daily or real-time retail fuel data source in Tasmania which is why we are currently unable to display fuel stations in Tasmania or per-Suburb pricing in this State. We are always on the eye out for better sources and are reaching out to other data providers to improve this.

I am looking for woolworths caltex fuel prices for the spearwood, south fremantle areas. I normally have this emailed to me every day, but have not had one today, so I am trying to find out the prices, so far NO LUCK!!!!!!!!!!!

We’ll be adding fuel brand filtering to the City and Suburb templates in the coming month and when that’s ready looking at how we can provide daily/weekly/monthly notifications filtered by brand and region to motorists.

Opening hours ?

Great suggestion! It’s on our todo list, to get the opening hours associated with fuel stations we can use the Google Places API, the catch is that this Google service is billable so we just need to be careful with how much data we fetch from this service per month (e.g. 500 stations per month) as doing it at once could very easily lead to a big Google Cloud API bill; right now we are monitoring 6,477 fuel stations.

Was looking for the AdBlue price.

Great suggestion! We’ve located a data source from BP that we can use to allow filtering by AdBlue availability at the pump and will reach out to the BP Sales team to see if they can provide pricing data to support this.

what servo is cheapest !

There’s a banner notice at the top of all historical fuel prices pages (e.g. Diesel prices in Townsville), we’ve added one to the bottom too which includes a jump link back to the summary city page that shows the cheapest and most expensive fuel stations.

Voice Search comes to FuelPrice Australia

You can now do fuel price searches using the microphone on your computer or Android/iOS mobile phone.

We’ll be improving the automatic redirection with time, currently the following search terms are supported:

  • City names (e.g. Brisbane, Cairns, Newcastle)
  • Station names (e.g. Puma Gladstone Depot)
  • Suburb names (e.g. Mooloolaba, Fairfield)
  • Postcodes (e.g. 4558, 4103)
  • States (e.g. Queensland, New South Wales, QLD, NSW)
  • Fuel types (e.g. 91, 98, e10, LPG)
  • Brands (e.g. Puma, FuelXpress)

For Desktop/laptop site visitors: Just click the microphone icon within the sidebar search widget and after allowing permission to use the microphone start speaking.

For mobile phone users (Android/iOS): Click the hamburger pull-down menu from the top-left corner of the screen then click the microphone icon. After allowing permission to use the microphone start speaking.

Gallery for mobile site visitors

(The microphone uses the techonology on your computer/mobile phone to convert speech to text and is only active for the moments after clicking the microphone icon with the connection terminating after each search)

We’re a Queensland Government fuel price reporting trial data publisher

We’re now listed on QLD’s DNRME website informing Queensland motorists of hourly changes to local fuel prices. Go team! 🙂

There’s still a laundry list of things to do.

VIC, TAS and ACT site visitors: Reach out to your State Government representatives and urge them to deliver real-time pricing data in your State. Without official data sources you’re in the dark.

For everyone else: We need feedback. If a fuel station in QLD, NSW, WA, NT (or soon to be SA) is missing or not working let us know by hitting the green and red buttons throughout this site so we can address it.

Changes for 16/01

Here’s a summary of changes since the last change announcement to FuelPrice Australia.

Added

  • Notice for VIC Suburbs where real-time data is not available
  • Suburbs now visible in Search
  • Styling for Suburb template
  • Suburb details template to WP Admin
  • Filter Suburbs by Postcode and locality
  • jQuery to show/hide Suburb letter groupings
  • Cheapest and most expensive stations to Suburb template
  • Log in/My Account widget above Search bar
  • My Account page
  • Refresh list of nearby stations for Suburbs weekly
  • Created WP-CLI commands for Suburbs
  • Search template for Suburb that includes Postcode and State
  • Privacy Policy to footer
  • WP-CLI commands for City price bands
  • Price band colour schemee to City template
  • Price legend under the Map on the City template
  • Radius detail to the City template when listing number of stations shown
  • Notice to Suburb template where no nearby stations are found
  • WP-CLI command to refresh Suburb last modified date
  • Suburbs summary template
  • Missing dot-green to yellow-red price template
  • Refresh site bands to Suburb actions
  • Australian map with clickable regions to Suburbs summary template
  • Notice to see hourly price heat mapping for towns/cities on City template
  • Notice to limited/not working fuel types (e.g. LPG, EV, CNG, B20, etc.) on
  • Separated City fuel type template
  • KML file with Australian states and their boundaries
  • Dismiss notice button styling for logged-in users
  • Fixed sidebar search button on resolutions between 955px and 1100px
  • Created separate files for each Page and Shortcode template
  • Removed Related Posts showing across the site
  • WP-CLI debugging for City and State jobs
  • WA stations not showing tomorrow price after 5pm
  • Map with State hover not working on Suburbs template
  • Size of site logo on resolutions lower than 955px and between 955px and 1255px
  • Google site search for searches with no results
  • Fixed duplicate notice showing on Cities without stations
  • Fixed API page not showing
  • Developer mode notice when site maintenance is happening
  • “Mark as favourite” button for Cities, Suburbs and Stations (supports mobile too)
  • Developer mode notice styling
  • Feature image to About page
  • Favourite Cites/Suburbs and Stations to the My Account template
  • Login form to the My Account template
  • Real-time data request notice to VIC, SA, TAS and ACT State, City and Suburb templates
  • Favourite buttons to hamburger menu for logged-in users
  • 100% Made in Australia to Footer (logo license costs $330 per year)
  • Custom Google Search for empty search results
  • User meta manager to Edit User screen within Admin
  • Progress bar to site search
  • Voice search to site search for logged-in users
  • Dashicons styling to My Account and log in sidebar links
  • Banner image to About page
  • Task legend to My Account page and Announcements template
  • Link to summary City page at bottom of detailed City fuel type template (e.g. Townsville > Diesel)
  • Message to login/register screens
  • City template displaying Postcode and State within Search Results
  • Maintenance notice to Sign up for updates template
  • Admin view of all Suburbs without Lat/Long data
  • Tomorrow price to WA Cities template from 5:30pm AEST
  • Redirect from WP Admin to My Account template for logged-in users
  • Actions to reset City, Surburb and Station counts
  • Action to set Lat/Long for missing Suburbs
  • Support for filtering Suburbs by State and missing Lat/Long
  • History count of corrupt QLD stations
  • Admin view of Suburbs without Lat/Long
  • IDDQD/God mode voice command support for Admins
  • Star Dashicon to Cities widget for logged-in users and their favourite Cities
  • Lat/Long columns to Admin view of Stations
  • Lat/Long to missing Suburbs
  • Ultimate Member integration
  • WP-CLI commands for refreshing state averages and missing Lat/Long for Suburbs
  • Notice to Suburbs to see heat map pricing
  • Notice to City and Suburb templates regarding missing fuel stations

Fixed

  • Width of Brand favicons on City and Suburb templates for mobile users
  • Turned off Lazyload as it breaks Maps for guest visitors
  • Use Transient first for cheapest/highest Stations on City template
  • Issue limiting hourly nearby sites refresh to single fuel type for Cities
  • Corrupt fuel price data notice not showing for QLD stations
  • Changed Suburb template to closely match Page template
  • More memory optimisations
  • Changed “Show all stations” link to a button on City and Suburb templates
  • Dismiss notice button for logged-in users
  • City and suburb search not returning first result
  • CSS styling issue between 990 and 1100px
  • Yesterday prices displaying in WA Stations when today’s price is available (before 10:30am AEST update)
  • Historical state average not updating
  • Heat map pricing for Suburbs not working
  • Misspelled Transient in Admin view

Changed

  • Moved Station, State and Suburb actions to separate files
  • Removed Standard prefix from ULP 91 Page title
  • Moved pre-search results to separate file
  • Increased search weighing for Suburbs in search results
  • Removed _job suffix from WP-CLI monitoring Transients
  • Remove city excerpt from Search Results template
  • Moved Cities widget styling to Plugin CSS
  • Moved generic actions to separate files
  • Moved admin functionality into separate files

ACT State Government resisting calls for fuel price monitoring

The ACT government is resisting calls to introduce a scheme that provides regular information on the movement of petrol prices, instead encouraging motorists to use independent websites that track prices.

Govt encourages drivers to use independent sites for petrol price info – Canberra Times

All Australian retail fuel monitoring Apps/websites (including us) rely on correct known prices to accurately inform motorists, without an official data source maintained by the ACT State Government we cannot guarantee the quality of displayed prices.

If you’re from the ACT reach out to your State Government representatives and urge them to join the party.

State’s with official data sources

  • [x] New South Wales
  • [  ] Victoria
  • [x] Queensland
  • [x] Western Australia
  • [..] South Australia
  • [  ] Tasmania
  • [  ] Australian Capital Territory
  • [x] Northern Territory