I don’t care about perks or rewards, I just want a free and open license database that enables me to find and contribute gas prices in my area without spying on me. I’ve searched AlternativeTo.net, but nothing open source comes up. Thanks!
I don’t care about perks or rewards, I just want a free and open license database that enables me to find and contribute gas prices in my area without spying on me. I’ve searched AlternativeTo.net, but nothing open source comes up. Thanks!
GasBuddy’s primary source is a crowdsourced user database. Kinda hard to recreate that at a FOSS level, as it will inevitably require a centralized server.
They also use OPIS, which is a subscription-based database. So who’s gonna pay for that?
I’m not following. I understand how Gas Buddy works (crowd sourced data entry), but how does that preclude free and open source software? For example, look at OpenStreetMap, open license database w/ a whole ecosystem of free and open source apps built around it.
Imagine if you had to recreate OSM every hour. Because that’s how often gas prices change.
I mean easy enough to recreate it with a more open database, but yeah key issue is userbase. Same flaw with trying to make a better dating site, or anything else location specific. It’s barely feasible for things like lemmy and mastadon where we pull from international pools of people that mostly don’t care if the other users are 500 miles away.
When you try to do a facebook equivelant, doesn’t really go anywhere because, people don’t need just people, but people they actually know.
and yeah trying to get “people in the same city”.
as obviously one guy just reporting the gas stations around him, for an application that only he uses, is just a fancy notebook, and the real problem is would he continue using it long enough for a second to appear and make it actually beneficial for anyone.
I wonder how many api requests you’d need to accomplish something usable that you supplement with crowd sourcing.
Seems like you could do something with this https://www.zylalabs.com/api-marketplace/data/us+gas+cost+finder+api/5922#pricing
(I clicked around a bit on opis, couldn’t easily find pricing and moved on)
But if you’re in the thousands of dollars a month, you’d need to be wealthy enough to not give a shit, or already need a solid userbase and to start monetizing it.