How Mantan gets official fuel prices from 89 countries and territories

Every price on Mantan comes from a public source: a government that publishes station prices, a government that sets the price itself, or you, when you photograph a price board. As of 1 November 2026, that adds up to 89 countries and territories with prices, and 173 where the map shows at least the stations.

Here is how each kind of source reaches the map, with three true stories from last week.

Countries that publish everything, station by station

In France, every station must by law declare its prices. The Ministry of the Economy publishes them as open data on prix-carburants.gouv.fr. Mantan downloads that feed every 10 minutes: close to 10,000 stations, each with the time of its last price change.

Spain publishes the same thing as JSON every hour, the Balearic and Canary Islands included (11,198 stations with a diesel price this morning). Portugal, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Quebec, Western Australia and New South Wales also have official feeds or APIs.

These feeds go down sometimes. On 21 October, the whole of prix-carburants.gouv.fr answered with a 502 error. The daily file, which carries the previous day's prices, still worked: Mantan keeps it as a backup, and the French map stayed full.

Italy raised a different problem. Since 17 October, the Italian ministry's website cannot be reached from outside Italy. The server behind the official "Osservaprezzi carburanti" app still answers, though: Mantan queries it region by region, 20 calls for the whole country, and gets back about 21,600 stations with the time of each report.

Price caps: one maximum, the same everywhere

In Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Czechia and Uruguay, the government publishes a maximum price. Stations may sell for less, never for more. Mantan puts that cap on every station in the country and says so plainly in the station card: the price shown is a government maximum, and a station may sell for less.

In Czechia, the Ministry of Finance publishes the cap every day in a PDF bulletin. Mantan reads the PDF, and takes the price off the map if no bulletin has been in force for 3 days.

Government-set prices: 58 countries copied from the source

Across much of Africa, the Middle East and many islands, the price is the same at every station because the government decides it. Mantan follows 58 of these countries. For each one, it reads the official decision: a press release, a decree, a monthly PDF, a news agency dispatch.

When no automatic reading is possible, the price is entered by hand with the date of the decision and the link to the text. Iraq is one example: the Oil Ministry's websites sit behind a CAPTCHA, so the prices (850 dinars a litre for Premium 95, 1,250 dinars for Super 98) are copied from the Council of Ministers' decision and checked again every 3 months. After 6 months without a check, an alert asks for the source to be read again.

Sources change shape without warning. In Zambia, the November press release, posted on 31 October, is a scan with no text in it. Mantan reads the monthly pump price build-up instead, a text PDF from the same regulator: 34.45 kwacha a litre of diesel from 1 November, the same figure as the scanned release.

Cambodia: Khmer digits, read twice

Cambodia's Ministry of Commerce sets the price of petrol and diesel every 10 days. The notice exists only as an image, posted on its public Telegram channel, with the prices written in Khmer digits. On an image 571 pixels wide, a digit is 6 pixels tall, and ៥ (5), ៩ (9) and ៨ (8) look very much alike.

Mantan enlarges the image, then has an image-reading program read it twice. Both readings must give exactly the same digits. Then the price is cross-checked three times, because the notice prints it three times:

• in the notice's sentence, in riel;
• in the table, in riel;
• in the table, in dollars, to be multiplied by the official rate printed at the bottom (4,072 riel to the dollar).

The converted dollar price must land within 75 riel of the riel price. One misread digit in any of the three numbers and the notice is set aside. The last validated price then stays on the map, with its date. Result for 21 October to 1 November: 5,050 riel a litre for 92 petrol and 5,550 riel for diesel, placed on about 1,650 stations.

The same method reads the price posters of Honduras and Panama, those of Palestine, and the drawn table from the prefect of Mayotte.

Stations: OpenStreetMap, and a plan B

A government-set price does not say where the stations are. Mantan takes them from OpenStreetMap, the free map kept up by volunteers, and reloads each country every week through the Overpass service.

On 31 October, Overpass went down: the main server refused connections, one mirror answered with an error, another served a copy from June. The countries switched on that day, Cambodia and Nicaragua among them, had no stations at all.

Mantan can now take another route: the Geofabrik extracts, a full copy of OpenStreetMap cut up by country. Real test on Nicaragua: a 62 MB file, 287 stations, 87 of them within the Managua circle. They are the same stations, at the same positions, that Overpass returned once it came back around 7 pm.

You: a photo of the price board

In countries where nothing is published, the map shows stations in grey with this message: "No prices published in this country. If you pass by, a photo of the price board will make them visible to everyone." The photo is read, each plausible price shows up as "not verified", and it disappears on its own as soon as the official source publishes something newer. The photo of the board is kept for a few days for moderation.

Receipts follow a stricter rule, because they often show the last digits of your card number. Mantan reads them to fill in your fill-up log, then deletes them straight away, without ever keeping them.

What you see in the station card

Each station card says what kind of price it shows and how old it is: price declared by the station, official maximum price, government-set price, or a user reading marked "not verified". Every source is credited on the site, with the body that publishes it.

Want to know where your station's price comes from? Open mantan.app and tap the station: the type of price and its date are in the card.