Fuel prices are climbing again. The Iran conflict has pushed wholesale oil costs up, and UK drivers are paying the price at the pump. For households already stretched, every extra penny per litre hits hard.
A Middlesbrough-based AI consultant has built a free tool to fight back. fuel.richardbatt.com searches more than 7,600 UK petrol stations using official UK Government fuel price data. Enter your postcode, and the tool returns the 10 cheapest stations nearby — with current prices, distances, and when each price was last updated. Then an AI layer does something no comparison site does: it reads the results and tells you, in plain English, which station is your best option and how much you would save per tank. No signup. No app to download. It works on any phone, tablet, or laptop.
The tool was built by Richard Batt, an AI implementation consultant based in Middlesbrough who has delivered more than 120 AI projects across 15 industries. He built it in direct response to rising fuel costs — not as a business venture, but because the data existed and nobody was putting it in front of drivers in a way that was actually useful.
“I’m from Middlesbrough. People here feel the squeeze harder than most. If this saves someone a fiver a week, that’s worth building,” Batt said.
Here is how it works. A driver enters their postcode. The tool searches nearby stations and returns the top 10 cheapest, showing the price per litre, distance from the postcode, and when the station last reported its prices. The AI then generates a plain-English summary recommending the best option based on price and proximity. It supports E10, E5, B7, and SDV fuel types. Search radius is adjustable from 5 to 25 kilometres.
“Petrol prices are climbing because of the Iran situation and I kept thinking — the government publishes all this data, 7,600 stations, updated regularly. Nobody’s making it easy to use. So I built something,” Batt said.
