A few months ago I was planning a road trip and wanted to work out roughly how much the drive would cost. I found plenty of fuel calculators online, but they all had the same problem. Before I could calculate anything, I still had to find the current fuel prices myself.
I found a few local apps, but they only covered one country. There were also plenty of websites, but every country had its own. If I wanted to compare prices before a trip, I still had to open three or four different tabs and piece everything together myself.
I remember thinking, why isn't this just in one place?
Around the same time I kept seeing people build things with AI, and I got curious. I'd never built a website before, but I thought I'd see if I could do it too. TankSmart is my first website, and honestly, I didn't know if I'd be able to pull it off.
The calculator was always the main idea. Once I had the fuel prices in one place, it made sense to use them instead of asking people to type everything in manually. If you're planning a trip, you can enter your distance and your car's fuel consumption to calculate your fuel costs using the latest available prices. If you're travelling with other people, you can split the fuel cost too.
The fuel prices are there because the calculator wouldn't be very useful without them. Right now TankSmart covers Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Hungary, Austria and Italy. Maybe one day I'll add more countries, but these are the ones I travel through most often.
For now I still update the prices manually every week using official sources from each country. It's not the most exciting part of the project, but I'd rather spend a few minutes updating everything than have outdated information. Hopefully one day I'll automate that as well.
TankSmart isn't trying to do everything. I just wanted one place where I could quickly check fuel prices and calculate the cost of a trip without jumping between five different websites. If it turns out it's useful to other people as well, that honestly makes me really happy.