App-a-Week: GasBuddy

By Andy Feng on Monday, September 14th, 2015

Happy Monday and welcome back to App-a-Week. This week we’re featuring a very useful little app called GasBuddy.

GasBuddy conveniently shows you up-to-date gas prices from all nearby gas stations. The key word here is “up-to-date”. Drawing from personal experience, there’s few things in this world that are quite as annoying than driving out of your way to that supposedly cheap gas station only to find out the prices are much higher than reported… cough* waze..cough**

GasBuddy shows you exactly how long ago the price was updated (usually a few hours), and for the most part guarantees accuracy by having users report new rates constantly. A simple glance (filtered by price of course) and you’ll notice that Costco has by far the cheapest gas.

I personally don’t have a Costco card but after using GasBuddy I’m seriously considering getting one just to buy their gas. According to a Huffington Post article, the average American consumes up to 558 gallons of gas per year. Multiply that by the average savings per mile of roughly 50 cents by exclusively filling up at Costco and you end up saving approximately $280 per year, significantly more than what a Costco membership costs.

So, in conclusion.. If you have a Costco card, always fill up at Costco. Otherwise, go download GasBuddy right now and get the latest scoop on where to find cheapest gas wherever you are. That’s it for this week’s App-a-Week post, I’ll leave you with this super-long infographic about gas prices and how the government profits from our financially crippling gas addiction.