CostaMeno

Every fuel app in Italy wanted something from me first

A login wall, a screen of ads, or my GPS coordinates — every existing fuel-price app demanded a toll before answering one simple question. I wanted zero ceremony: open a URL while standing at a pump, see which station nearby is cheapest. That's the whole product.

The raw material was hiding in plain sight. The Italian Ministry of Enterprises (MIMIT) publishes a daily open-data CSV of every fuel station in the country — around 23,000 stations with prices for benzina, gasolio, GPL, and metano, updated every morning, no API key, no rate limit. Nobody had turned it into something you'd actually want to use at the pump. CostaMeno is that thing.

Tap the map, get an answer you can act on

There is no permission prompt. You tap the map where you are — or drag the pin — and the search fires. An adaptive radius starts tight and expands until it finds enough stations: 3 km in a dense city, wider on an empty highway. Results come back as color-coded pins — green cheap, red expensive, relative to what's actually around you — with medal badges on the three best.

• No GPS, by design

  Your coordinates never leave the map you tapped. Partly privacy, partly UX — a permission dialog is friction you don't want with a fuel nozzle in hand.

• The number that decides

  Each station card computes real savings: "drive 4 km to this station and save ~0.90 € on a 50 L fill." Not just a price — a decision.

• Fresh public data

  MIMIT's daily CSV is fetched and cached at build time, refreshed at runtime. Government open data, made useful at street level.

• Nothing between you and it

  No account, no ads, no tracking, no install. A URL that answers a question.

Small scope, fully kept

CostaMeno is live, free, and deliberately finished in shape: Next.js and Leaflet on top of a clean data pipeline, hosted on Vercel, maintained as the data source evolves. It's also a small proof of a bigger conviction — that public data plus sharp scope plus trust-first design beats another ad-funded app every time.

I use it every time I fill up. It does the thing — and it never asks for anything back.