Download CV
Industry
Consumer Mobile
Client
SquaredMc
Role
Lead Product Designer

Refuelr – Cheapest fuel finder

  • iOS App
  • UI/UX
  • Open Data
  • AI Tooling
Three iPhones showing Refuelr: the map with the cheapest station, the splash screen, and the onboarding screen

My Contribution

Owned

  • Product, brand and build, end to end
  • Scope: what shipped and what didn’t
  • AI tools and delivery workflow

Led

  • Every design decision, idea to App Store
  • Testing with TestFlight users
  • Data quality rules, for accurate prices

Impact

  • One clear result for any UK postcode
  • 8,166 stations covered from open data
  • Real logos for 30 brands

The Problem

Fuel prices are public now. The government publishes them as open data, and they show up on Google. Seeing a price isn’t the hard part. Knowing which station is worth the drive is.

The cheapest station might be a long way off, and the nearest might cost noticeably more. What’s best depends on where you are, how far you’ll go, and what you drive.

Refuelr answers one question for the user:

Where’s the cheapest
fuel that’s near me?

Diagram: open price data, Google and price-per-litre lists already exist; which station is closest, whether the detour is worth it and what a fill-up costs are left to the driver; Refuelr shows the cheapest station nearby and what it saves.
Refuelr’s App Store listing: ‘The cheapest fuel near you’, with four screenshots of the three-step setup

The Challenges

The first version tried to do too much. Savings tracking and price alerts were both built, and I cut both from 1.0. They were useful, but they pulled attention away from the one question the app had to answer well, so they went to the backlog.

The bigger risk was trust. A price app that’s wrong once doesn’t get opened again. The open data had gaps, including missing diesel prices and occasional values no forecourt would charge, so I fixed the gaps and filtered out anything outside £1.30 to £3.50 a litre. I also removed an “Open” label, because the data couldn’t reliably back it up.

So the brief wasn’t just “show the prices,” it was to show one answer people can trust, and let them check the rest.

Some constraints came from outside. I built a number plate lookup using the DVLA API, then DVLA closed API registration. I replaced it with a simple car-size picker, which still gives a per-tank cost without asking for a registration.

I built Refuelr myself, with Claude Code as my main development agent for code changes, git and debugging. It went from an HTML prototype to a React app, then into a native iOS build with Capacitor and Ionic Appflow. Building it rather than drawing it meant I could test each decision on a real phone, with real prices, and cut what didn’t hold up.

Refuelr 1.0: what was shipped, cut, and replaced. Shipped: cheapest station in a hero card, cheapest/nearest toggle, widening search radius, cost per tank, map opening on the cheapest station, real brand logos. Cut to the backlog: savings tracking, price alerts, best-value sort. Replaced: DVLA number plate lookup with a manual car-size picker. Trust rules: missing diesel prices fixed, prices outside £1.30 to £3.50 filtered out, Open label removed.

The Product

Cheapest near you: Scrubs Lane Service Station at £1.679 in the hero card

The cheapest station sits in a hero card at the top, so the answer comes before the list

Station list and settings with fuel type, price display and search radius

Sort by cheapest or nearest within a radius you set, widening automatically where stations are sparse

Car size picker beside the cost-per-tank breakdown for a quarter, half and full tank

Your car size turns pence per litre into what a fill-up actually costs

Map view opened on the cheapest station with a Route here button

The map opens on the cheapest station, with real brand logos and coloured initials for the rest

Same 5p saving, different value

Sainsbury’s vs JET: 5p a litre cheaper, 1.4 miles further each way

Full tank (50 litres)

Saving £2.50
Extra driving −£0.53  →  net £1.97

Quarter tank (12.5 litres)

Saving £0.63
Extra driving −£0.53  →  net £0.10

Assumes 40mpg and £1.67 a litre. Illustrative, not app output.

Cheapest, nearest, or best for me?

The obvious next step was a single “best for me” ranking that weighs the saving against the detour. In one search, a Sainsbury’s was 5p a litre cheaper than a JET but 1.4 miles further away. On a full tank that saves about £2.50. On a quarter tank, the extra driving roughly cancels it out.

I chose not to build it for 1.0. A blended score has to guess how far your car goes and how much you’re buying, and a wrong guess costs trust. So the cheapest station always sits in the hero card, and the toggle lets people choose. A “best value” sort is first on the backlog, shaped by what people actually use.

The Result

Refuelr launched on the App Store in October 2026. It covers every station in the UK’s open price data, with a deliberately small scope and a clear backlog for what comes next.

The decisions that shaped it were mostly about what to leave out: two finished features, a number plate lookup, and a ranking that would have had to guess.

Link to App Store
8,166UK stations covered from government open data.
30 brandsReal logos, and coloured initials for the rest.
25Downloads since launch on the App Store.
Version 1.0Designed and built, from idea to App Store.
A wall of Refuelr screens: splash, onboarding, car setup, cheapest-near-you list and settings