Meet the new app helping Russians find gas amid the country’s fuel crisis

Against the backdrop of Russia’s fuel crisis, large companies like Yandex and Sberbank, as well as individual enthusiasts, have been developing tools to help Russians find gas stations that still have fuel. A few weeks ago, an app called “GdeBENZ” appeared in the App Store and RuStore, and it became more popular than its larger, better-known counterpart, Yandex Zapravki, with remarkable speed. Meduza spoke with one of the app’s creators about how it came to be — and why it borrowed its name from an already-existing gas station search project.

— How does your app work?

— We function as an aggregator of every website and service related to finding gas. So we’re not just drawing on our own users. We pull in map data from T-Bank, Yandex Zapravki, and Sberbank’s gas station search service — essentially everyone.

We’ve developed a fairly reliable sense of who can be trusted. We filter out data from services that tend to produce more errors in their markers. We do trust information from Sberbank and T-Bank — they build their statistics from payment data of customers who actually paid for fuel at a gas station, rather than simply leaving a review on a map.

— Do these services share their data with you directly?

— No, but nobody prohibits us from taking it. We have parsers — essentially bots that, just like regular users, visit websites, see all those gas station markers, and save the information at regular intervals.

Users often write to us directly by email. We’ve received messages along the lines of: “I work at a gas station — let me flag when there’s fuel and when there isn’t.” I’m not sure whether that was a scam, but just to be safe we simply thanked them and left it at that. Besides, one data point among tens of thousands of gas stations doesn’t amount to much.

— How do you determine what region a user is from? A lot of people in Russia use VPNs.

— When you open the app, we request your geolocation. That matters partly for improving data accuracy. If someone is more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the gas station they’re voting on, we don’t count their vote.

We’ve also figured out something about users who are voting from very far away from the stations they’re rating — and voting incorrectly. At first I thought these were people in Moscow leaving reviews for Moscow gas stations whose GPS jammers were throwing their location somewhere else. It turned out they were actually different users from different regions of Russia who, for some reason, were incorrectly voting on gas stations in Crimea.

— What do you mean by “incorrectly”?

— The data they’re submitting doesn’t match the data from users who are actually near those gas stations.

— I wanted to ask whether you’re seeing sabotage from Ukrainians. There are reels on Instagram where they’re asking each other to deliberately enter false data on Russian “fuel” maps — marking stations as out of fuel where there is fuel, and vice versa. So as the app’s developer, you can actually see this happening?

— Ukraine’s Defense Ministry adviser himself [Serhii Sternenko] called for people to leave false markers on maps. An app is easier to protect from that kind of attack than a website — unless someone is manually tapping on every single gas station on the map and leaving incorrect reviews. And even then, I can wipe all of that out with a single filter.

Every user in our system has an identifier. We don’t know who the person is, of course, but we can see that a device with a given ID has been leaving reviews at different gas stations across different regions. We trust that ID less.

— So manual moderation doesn’t take up much time?

— No, it’s all automated: I come up with a filter and integrate it into the system.

— You’re based outside Russia. How difficult is it to work on software like this from abroad? You can’t personally verify what the situation actually looks like in any given town.

— Developing software outside Russia is actually easier: you can use the App Store without any problems, whereas inside Russia you need foreign bank cards to do that; you have access to Claude Code without worrying that your account will get banned because of a VPN.

As for understanding what’s happening on the ground: suppose you’re in Moscow and you can see the problem has eased there, but you can’t see what’s going on in other regions. As long as we’re still connected to each other and seeing the same information stream, I think we can feel the problem equally.

— Living outside Russia, you don’t personally face a fuel shortage. Why did you decide to build this software?

— A few weeks ago I noticed that several similar websites had appeared. One of them was “GdeBENZ” (Editor’s note: the name of the app built by Meduza’s interviewee is identical to the name of this website and its associated Telegram channel). The Telegram channel for that site was reporting 800,000 daily users. And the channel itself already had around 10,000 subscribers.

But when I checked Google Play and the App Store, there wasn’t a single app [for finding gas]. And an app was clearly needed. A website isn’t very convenient to use on a smartphone, whereas with an app you can add a widget to your home screen, and push notifications from an app reach you better than alerts from a website.

I decided to be the first to build one.

— So it was a kind of professional competitive drive?

— Yeah. I get excited when there’s a challenge to quickly build a prototype and find out whether users actually need it. Before I published “GdeBENZ” [in the app stores], I had no sense of the scale of the problem. Then a few days later we had hundreds of thousands of downloads. That’s when I realized: this is a genuinely big problem.

Early in the summer [in the media and on social media], an app called “Gde benzin?” (“Where’s the gas?”) had been making the rounds, but it was Android-only and could only be downloaded from its own website. As I later discovered by looking at the page’s source code, that site operated on a very strange scheme: whether a station had gas or not was determined randomly, not based on user ratings. It looked like they wanted to make users think the map was real, but it wasn’t.

— So it was some kind of scam project?

— I think so. It attracted attention because it said something like: “Priority for the FSB and law enforcement agencies.” In practice, the data there was fake.

Anyway, two weeks ago I published my app in the stores [App Store and RuStore] — and downloads took off very quickly. In just a few hours, the app was downloaded 11,000 times in the App Store — which is incredible for a new release. Within two days, the App Store alone had racked up 40,000 downloads. And it’s only gone up from there.

Yevgeny Chudov, the creator of the GdeBENZ website, wrote in his Telegram channel that my app was made by scammers and urged people to report it. Chudov is probably new to the internet or this is his first popular project, but his call to action had the opposite effect — it drove a sharp spike in downloads. There’s no other way to rate an app: people download it, open it, see that it’s not a scam, and use it.

— Why did you decide to name your app the same as an already-existing gas station search website?

— As of June 29, it was the most popular [search query] on Yandex and Google related to gas. I figured the same would probably be true in the App Store and Google Play, so that’s the name I went with.

The creator of the GdeBENZ website [Yevgeny Chudov] started filing complaints with every platform, claiming I was using his brand, even though my logos are my own. The name — yes, it’s similar. His brand hasn’t been registered yet; there’s only an application pending, and the platforms [App Store and RuStore] haven’t been paying attention to his complaints so far.

When he first complained about me to someone, I reached out and said I was willing to get on a call and discuss a collaboration, but he responded with an ultimatum: either I delete the app, hand it over to him, or all further communication would go through his patent attorney.

So we didn’t end up becoming friends. But it’s fine. Even if he registers his trademark in two or three months, we’ll just rename the app. By then the [fuel] problem may have gone away entirely.

Meduza asked Yevgeny Chudov for comment but had not received a response by the time this article was published.

— What else is driving downloads of your app?

— Pure organic growth. I don’t see any articles about the app, nothing like that. People search by name, and as far as I can tell it’s still topping the charts in Russia — in the lifestyle category. I chose that category because it’s less competitive than, say, transportation. And it generally seems like a reasonable fit.

If you look at the app’s ratings, it’s sitting around 4.5 to 4.6. People like it, and the App Store is promoting it. For a while it was even featured on the App Store’s main page in the top apps in Russia.

— How many people are using the app now?

— On average, about 130,000 to 140,000 people open it per day. In two weeks total, there have been nearly half a million unique users.

The other day I was checking new installs: in Moscow there’s been a sharp drop in downloads, while across the regions there’s been a sharp surge. In Kazan, the Chelyabinsk region, and Perm Krai, downloads have tripled or quadrupled over the past few days.

The app has a sharing feature: you can go to a gas station’s page, share a link to it, and it opens in a browser. So someone who doesn’t have the app can immediately see what the situation is at that station. Right now I’m seeing a boom in that kind of sharing in Tatarstan.

It looks like the fuel situation in Moscow is improving. In the regions — not so much. We can see this both from user markers and from the fact that Yandex Zapravki has dropped out of the App Store top charts. I can’t even find it in the top 10, and it covers the Moscow region best — it has a lot of stations from Moscow and maybe a couple in each other region. The app’s main concept is that you can pay [for fuel] before you even arrive at the station. That feature is available mostly in Moscow.