Building a UK-wide fuel price tracker with Next.js and the CMA open data scheme

The Competition and Markets Authority spent 2023 doing something regulators rarely pull off: it ran a market study into UK fuel retail, identified structural opacity in pump pricing, and extracted binding commitments from major retailers to publish live price data through a standardised open data scheme. That last part — the open data scheme — is the kind of policy outcome that usually dies quietly. A commitment is made, a portal is stood up somewhere, and the broader developer community never finds out it exists. Then, in mid-April, a UK developer published a detailed technical write-up on Dev.to showing what happens when someone actually builds with it. The project uses Next.js to pull from the CMA's scheme, aggregate pricing data across UK forecourts, and present a live, queryable fuel price tracker. The post walks through the architecture — fetching from multiple retailer feeds, normalising inconsistent data formats, handling the latency of near-real-time updates — with enough specificity to function as a practical guide for anyone wanting to build on the same foundation. One developer, working with publicly available regulatory data, built what the industry arguably should have built itself years ago.

If confirmed, here is what this means: the CMA's open data intervention has crossed from policy into working software, and that crossing is the important event. A single developer post on Dev.to tends to travel. Other developers will find it, fork it, extend it — price comparison tools, route-planning integrations, journalism applications, consumer apps. The data was always there in principle; a practical demonstration of how to use it removes the activation energy. For the major retailers, this is quietly uncomfortable. Pricing opacity has historically served them well, and a functional tracker surfacing real-time price differentials between forecourts in the same postcode is not a comfortable development. For regulators, it is a rare proof point: the scheme worked well enough that someone built on it unprompted, which is the actual measure of a successful open data mandate. The second-order effect — other developers normalising this approach, treating fuel price data as a standard API call — could matter more than the original project.

Watch for the Dev.to post accumulating significant engagement, forks, or follow-up projects over the coming weeks; that would confirm the data scheme is genuinely usable and not just technically accessible. Any response from the CMA or the retailers — acknowledging the project, updating the scheme's documentation, or quietly tightening access terms — would tell you something important about how they feel about the visibility.

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