Why Your Pump Price Matters — and How Ten Seconds Fixes Our Estimate

We track diesel and gasoline retail prices in roughly 200 countries. For about a third of them — the US, the EU bloc, Spain, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia — a government agency publishes weekly pump prices we can read directly. For the other two thirds, there is no official feed. We're stitching together what we can from news articles, currency data, and crude benchmark movements.

That 'stitching' is where the errors creep in. News extraction catches headlines like 'diesel up ₱1.80 per liter next Tuesday' just fine, but it's asymmetric by construction: price hikes generate more coverage than rollbacks, so the automated estimate tends to drift upward over time. If a country goes two or three weeks without a corroborating news story, the model is extrapolating from a single old article — and if that article happened to report the peak of a spike, every subsequent day's estimate is anchored to a number that was wrong the day it was printed.

The fix we've been building over the last month is a second estimation model — call it Model 2 — that treats every piece of evidence as a probabilistic observation with its own uncertainty. A government source is trusted tightly. A news article is trusted less. A single user report is trusted less still, but it is heard. When two users independently report the same price within a day, the system promotes their reports to a 'verified' status that outweighs our own extrapolation. The math is standard Bayesian inverse-variance fusion; the interesting part is what it does to the incentives: your pump price, entered once, becomes the strongest available evidence for your country for the next several days.

This is why every country page now carries a 'Report a price' card near the top. It takes about ten seconds. No account, no email, no tracking. The form asks for the number on the pump board, in whatever currency and unit you use — we do the conversion server-side, so there's no way to accidentally report gallons when the database expects liters. If your number looks plausible against recent history for your country, the system provisionally trusts it after twenty-four hours and fully trusts it the moment a second person corroborates.

We are particularly under-served in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — markets where pricing is often adjusted weekly but where we lack a clean government feed. If you live in any of these countries and see a discrepancy between our displayed price and what you actually paid at the pump today, that is exactly the signal we need. Submit once. If the number is off by more than five percent, the system flags it, and your next visit will show a corrected estimate.

This is the smallest possible contribution with the largest possible effect. A single accurate pump price, entered by someone who was physically standing at the station, resolves more uncertainty than a full day of our news scraping for that country. We built the machine; you make it honest.