GasBuddy: Find & Pay for Gas ١٧+

I have been a GasBuddy member since the app first appeared on the AppStore. I also had signed up for the GasBuddy card as one of the pilot customers. I loved it but do not use the card anymore because of issues I had years ago with promos. I never got them so I stopped using the card. This was and is a good idea (to crowdsource gas prices). I loved the addition of other features, especially of keeping up with fill-ups. Every time I fill up at a gas station, I record it in the vehicle section of My Car. My most pressing issue is that it has gotten messy. I only keep records on one car but my car appears 4 or 5 times and the records are spread over the 4 or 5 iterations of “my car.” I see no easy way to combine them but to add and delete them one by one. Since I’m a long time user, this would take too much time and effort. It seems that every time there is an update, it doesn’t recognize the previous entry of “my car” and forces one to add your car once again. Please fix this or have some way to combine everything into the same “car.” It’s a bit annoying when you only have one vehicle recorded but have multiple listed.

GasBuddy was and is still a great concept, and I was happy using it once upon a time - when gas was cheaper and they hadn’t “sold out”. Times change. As they became more popular, it seems the discounts became less focused on fuel savings and more focused on cash back to spend in stores (I.e. sponsored advertising). But it came to a head with the record fuel prices and I gave up on them. At this point, saving less than $1 per fill up doesn’t help anyone like me. Maybe if you have a small car and/or don’t drive much, but to me it doesn’t help. The “premium” membership isn’t worth paying $10/month for either, because on average I’d only save about $7.50 in a month with their rate. Not worth it!

But the final two nails in the coffin were this: Several times I had fueled up using my Pay with GasBuddy card on deal alerts and didn’t get the deal even acknowledged or applied in the app. CS was less than responsive about this, basically saying they didn’t know why it wasn’t working.

Lastly and most importantly, they have a $75 daily spending cap and $300 weekly spending cap. I can’t even get 3/4 of a tank with $75 these days! They claim they can’t and won’t raise the cap for contractual obligations. Well, I’m gone. That does me no good. With the entire nation at $4.50+/gal now, y’all need to get with the times or lose once loyal customers such as myself.

I really wanted to give a better rating. I remember when Gas Buddy launched and the creator did a segment plugging the app. The idea and intentions of the creator are well. I just wish the card worked as well as any debit or credit card works. Sure there are issues here and there with bank cards, but more often than not my gas buddy card doesn’t work. It’s disappointing because I know it doesn’t have to be like this today. I hope it’s only me or just people who have this problem and the card works smoothly for as many users as possible. I did try and contact gas buddy about my problem but I don’t think they understood or I was clear or maybe one of them annoying customer and subscription killing chat bots tried to answer my question because they answered an unrelated question based on some similar words I used. I try not to think about the savings I am missing out on and genuinely disappointed. I gave up even using it and did not want to. I was pulling for gas buddy to be a success. I was even entering gas prices while my card wasn’t working until the last time when I entered the price an hour later when I got home and because i made the decision to share my location with gas buddy and whoever they sell it to, the app knew that I wasn’t anywhere near the gas station and doubted my entry. 😞