Built for us, by one of us.

FuelWatchNI is a free, real-time fuel price comparison tool built specifically for Northern Ireland.

The service tracks petrol and diesel prices at over 375 forecourts across the country, from big supermarket forecourts to your local independent filling station, and surfaces the cheapest options near you, right now.

There's no subscription. No account to create. No App Store. Open the site, save it to your phone, and save money. That's it.

Why I built it

My whole life, I've heard only one subject talked about more in Northern Ireland than the weather, and that's the price of petrol and diesel. We're lucky to have great independent retailers alongside the big high street brands in this country (sometimes right across the street from one another) but that makes tracking prices and knowing where to spend your money genuinely difficult.

How often have you heard: "You paid how much? You should have gone to Joe's" — and there's always a Joe, wherever you're from. How many times have you said to yourself, "I'll stick a tenner in to get me home and find somewhere cheaper on the way." Or the worst one — you've driven off a forecourt on the way into town, only to spot a garage on the way out that's 5p cheaper.

For years I wanted to fix this. I talked (at length) about building an app that would just tell you what the prices are nearby, and then my mum thought it was a great idea so she has been on at me (at length) for years to get it done. So here it is: FuelWatchNI — and the only person happier about it than me is my mum! During testing we found a station just two minutes off the main road she uses every day, and she ended up saving a fortune by going somewhere she had never thought of before. That's the purpose of it all. No more guess work, and always knowing you got the best price that you could.

Moving back here recently opened my eyes to how much we rely on our cars in Northern Ireland. Public transport just isn't viable for most people when services are scarce in your area. So when the opportunity came to spend time building something, I wanted it to be useful for as many people as possible.

What makes FuelWatchNI different

I know there are other apps and sites out there promising similar things, showing you "live" prices. But since becoming an approved recipient of the data myself, I can tell you that a lot of those sites are publishing unfiltered, unverified prices — some of which are stale, improperly entered, or as I recently found out, potentially months old. This site won't do that, and I can point to Dungannon on a map too.

I say that with half a smile, because most of these services are focused on Great Britain and treat Northern Ireland as a nice-to-have, publishing proces just becuase they have them, without checking whether the information they're putting out is actually correct. They assume that because a price is in a spreadsheet, it must be right. It isn't. And that kind of carelessness undermines confidence in the whole system.

FuelWatchNI is the only NI-focused service that puts drivers here first. Every price goes through a series of quality checks before it's published: price swings, petrol versus diesel comparisons, system entry validation, county-level spread, and yes, checking that whoever filled in their part of the data put the decimal point in the right place at every single station.

Recently I found that even that wasn't enough. A price that was two months old made it through because my system was counting hours and days, not weeks and months. I've fixed that, and I'll keep adapting — to the market, to unusual price swings, and to the reality of stations across the country working toward full compliance with the new regulations.

Covering Northern Ireland — together

As that compliance continues to grow, so does the site. The Government's fuel pricing transparency mandate requires forecourts to report their prices within 30 minutes of every change. That's a lot to track, and it requires some trust that stations are holding up their end. We launched with over 300 stations and we're adding more all the time.

But I don't do this alone.

FuelWatchNI has a community of drivers across Northern Ireland who help keep the data sharp. If a price looks wrong at your local station, you can flag it in 30 seconds in the app. If a forecourt is missing, you can tell us. Every report helps every other driver who checks that station after you.

The more people use it, the better it gets — for everyone.

One wee check. Then fill.

Contact: Contact us • Privacy & data: Privacy & Data Protection Policy • Terms: Terms of Use • Data notes: Fuel Watch NI data • Privacy email: privacy@fuelwatchni.co.uk
Map outline credit: NIShape.svg by DankJae (CC BY 4.0)