CarbuRadar

Overview

CarbuRadar is a React Native app (Expo) for finding and monitoring fuel prices across France — 11,000+ stations, 6 fuel types, official government data. No ads, no account. It combines an interactive map of geolocated stations with a ranked list view, so drivers can spot the cheapest fuel around them in seconds — and, more importantly, know whether the detour is actually worth it.

I developed this application from scratch while experimenting with an AI-assisted development workflow using Claude Code to explore how tools like AI coding assistants can support the development process.

The problem

Fuel prices in France can vary significantly between neighboring stations, and price-comparison tools usually stop at the pump price. But the cheapest pump is not always the cheapest trip: driving out of your way can burn more money in fuel than the discount saves. CarbuRadar treats that as a data problem worth solving properly.

Key features

• Interactive map with markers color-ranked by price, searchable by city or postal code.
• Ranked list view — sortable by best total choice, price, distance or freshness, with min / average / max statistics for the area.
• Station detail: all fuels with recent trend indicator, available services, stock outages, and one-tap navigation via Waze or Google Maps.
• "Worth the detour?" analysis: for each station, the app computes a true total cost — a full tank at the local price plus the fuel burned driving there and back — and compares it against the nearest station offering the same fuel. Tank size and consumption come from the user's filters; distances use real OSRM road routing over OpenStreetMap data, with straight-line fallback if the service is unavailable. The verdict is explicit: "best all-in choice" or "not the best choice", with the estimated difference in euros.
• Favorites and price alerts: mark your usual stations and get a push notification the moment a price drops below your custom threshold.
• Custom branding, including a hand-designed SVG splash screen (react-native-svg + expo-splash-screen).

Data & privacy

Prices come from the official French Ministry of the Economy open dataset (Licence Ouverte v2.0), ingested through a dedicated API, each reading displayed with its timestamp. Privacy is a feature: no account required, the user's location never leaves the device, and favorites and alerts are tied to an anonymous device identifier.

Why it matters

It's a small product built end-to-end — open data ingestion, geolocation, road routing, visualization, mobile UX, push notifications and branding — and a playground for turning a real everyday question ("is that cheaper station actually worth the drive?") into a clear, honest answer.

What I learned

This project helped me strengthen my full-stack development skills while exploring how AI tools can fit into a modern software development workflow.

Using Claude Code as a development assistant showed me that AI can accelerate implementation and help explore solutions quickly, while architectural decisions, code review, and technical judgment remain essential parts of building reliable software.