Gas Finder has been shut down, yes.
August 18th, 2008 Posted in Events, Life, Misc
For those of you who didn’t already notice, we’ve had a “site down for maintenance” notice up on Gas Finder for the past couple of days, almost going on a week now. Why? Well, we made a multimillion dollar company mad. Oops. Fear the wrath of the attorneys of a multimillion dollar company!
Our main service provider for gas price data was Motortrend. Motortrend gets their price data from a company called OPIS (Oil Pricing Information Services) which monitors the price of gas by analyzing credit card transactions throughout the entire US. Motortrend has a public RSS feed for gas price data and that’s where we got our data from. Several days ago now, we got a “friendly” call from the head attorney representing OPIS requesting a cease and desist within 48 hours.
What’s funny to me is that the gas price data is publicly available. If you wanted, you could subscribe to the RSS feed and get it right in your Inbox. And yet they call us “pirates.” Hmm? If they really wanted to protect their data, they should hide their feed, or at least encode it. Or something.
So, we got back with the head attorney, requesting information about the licensing. And guess how much it costs…
$1,500-$25,000 a month. Yeah. Major oops.
A note to anybody who wants to start a gas finder service - you can’t. We tried. And we got fried. Unless you can get proper licensing from OPIS, you will eventually be shut down. Learn from our experience. It’s already being done by Mapquest, Motortrend, Automotive, MSN, and more… so unless you got a boatload of cash…
It’s fun to say that I’ve almost been sued by a multimillion dollar company. At least I can say that I did it. Fun.
9 Responses to “Gas Finder has been shut down, yes.”
By Aaron Wakling on Aug 18, 2008
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work :)
By Xepha on Aug 18, 2008
It’s sad… but I think it was still a good experience for you. I mean, you did learn stuff from it ;D.
By HBK on Aug 18, 2008
Heh, you can’t do it in the US. Try Portugal and you can get around the law really easily, or just spoof your IP and they can’t get you, like The Pirate Bay did with the Italian government. The latin countries governments fail, tbh, and Portugal’s one of them. :P
By Kiersie on Aug 18, 2008
hey, idea; i mean you’ve probably already thought about this kind of stuff. but couldn’t you keep the group and instead of getting the gas prices from a site that already does all the work, couldn’t you just let it up to the members of the group…like post where the cheapest gas is in their area…and then people could also submit questions like if they’re going on a road trip or something and want to know the best prices…or price estimates in certain places…and another group member can answer themmm that kind of stuff….
bummer that it didn’t work out the way you wanted :(
By Crusher on Aug 19, 2008
That really sucks. I don’t see what their beef is, after all, like you said, the information you draw on is totally public. Like V said, at least you have the work experience from it all. And the ability to tell people you got just about got smashed by a cash cow XD.
By Anna on Aug 19, 2008
wow. sheesh!
That is decently exciting though. :P
By nombre on Aug 20, 2008
Anyone link to the feed?
By Ian on Aug 20, 2008
Thanks for your thoughts Kiersie… perhaps we can work around this. I don’t know though, I doubt it.
By TrinitronX on Oct 3, 2008
Well, it looks like your rights were violated by a greedy corporation.
Check this out:
http://www.opisnet.com/pressrelease.asp#igas
Yeah… they don’t want you using FREE PUBLIC Information due to their own iPhone app that they want people to PAY for!
Oh… and not only do they want you to pay for their app once. No… they want you to pay for a subscription service! Check out their fine print:
“Note: The iGas app will not be able to retrieve data one year after its first use. Yearly renewal apps will be available. ”
Yup, they’re greedy alright. Your app was awesome while it lasted, if I were you I’d check my options to fight back.
‘Information wants to be free…’
-TrinitronX