7 Comments Add your own

• 1. !  |  May 28th, 2007 at 7:07 pm

  a station close by here consistently sells gas for 10 cents less a gallon than anyone around.

  they line up sometimes 5 and 6 deep to take advantage of this “bargain”.

  20 gallons @ .10 per saves you $2 but takes 45 minutes of your time.

  you gotta work hard to save $2

  or do as ! and go there around midnight on a weekday.

• 2. Don Day  |  May 28th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

  These sites are great in theory, but the prices are often inaccurate and old. I’m all for user-generated content, but this is a place where accuracy and timeliness matter.

  Not to shill for MSN, but they have the single best gas price site I’ve found. It uses credit card transaction data to determine each day’s prices. That means that the prices on the site are fresh - and dead accurate. It does leave a small hole: since Coscto (and some other outlets) gas stations don’t accept credit cards, they aren’t included - but other than that, I’ve found it to be great.

  Instead of trying to do prices ourselves, or linking to GasBuddy.com or GasPriceWatch.com, we’ve set up a matrix of links to the MSN site.

  Click my name for a link to the site’s downtown Seattle page.

• 3. discreet_chaos  |  May 28th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

  Don, that is neat and it’s cleaner than the gasbuddy sites, but as you said in your comment: It isn’t wholly accurate. The “cheap” place in my small town doesn’t show up and as I was running out to put some gas in my wife’s car, I noticed a place higher than the highest.

  I like the concept and I have bookmarked it, but if it misses the lowest and the highest out of the fifteen or sixteen stations in my town, then you really shouldn’t treat it like the bible.

  As for the gas buddy sites - I sometimes post the local prices, but mostly I use it for when I’m going someplace. It’s about an hour and a half to Albuquerque from here and there’s three towns or maybe six exits. Whenever I’m headed to Abq, I punch-up to see what part of town has the lowest prices; what the lowest price I can expect will be (for comparison) and I punch-up at least one of the towns between here and there, plus the Reservation.

  The same goes for whenever I take a roadtrip. Gas prices can vary widely in this part of the world, especially when you factor-in stuff like the timing of shipments, so I’ll usually throw a few towns into the gasbuddy sites to see where I should and should not stop for fuel.

  Still, I like the MSN interface and it’s certainly worth a bookmark.

• 4. discreet_chaos  |  May 28th, 2007 at 11:58 pm

  PS) Based on my own cursory knowledge and the stuff, I make-up as I go along; It appears that gasbuddy did a flurry of press releases, when gas prices first skyrocketed about a year or so ago. I think this act, along with their localized addresses resulted in them being listed under “Links” on a majority of television websites, so this probably helps them dominate the market.

• 5. Jeff Bailey  |  May 29th, 2007 at 8:49 am

  Don, and others;

  You don’t necessarily have to shill for MSN. They use the Oil Price Information Service to get their numbers. I use and link to AAA’s version of the service at fuelgaugereport.com

  As far as gasbuddy, et al, I’ve never seen the point of price shopping this way either. I’m not driving ten miles to save 10-cents a gallon. I splurge the extra $1.50 it takes to fill up my Subaru, and not buy an ice cream bar from the station vending machine to make up the difference.

• 6. Victor  |  September 15th, 2007 at 5:50 am

  j

• 7. Victor  |  September 28th, 2007 at 12:50 pm

  myfreepaysite video

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