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

Russia's fuel crisis has sparked intense competition among solution-builders, and one app is winning decisively. Meduza spoke with the creator of GdeBENZ, an app that launched two weeks ago and accumulated 40,000 App Store downloads within two days, quickly surpassing established rivals like Yandex Zapravki. The app aggregates real-time fuel data from Yandex, Sberbank, and T-Bank—automatically pulling from their maps and services—then filters out unreliable sources and submissions from users located far from the stations they're rating. That defense matters: Ukrainian officials have publicly called for coordinated sabotage campaigns flooding gas-station maps with false data. The app's success has sparked a trademark dispute with an earlier GdeBENZ website, though the challenger's complaints have gone nowhere for lack of a registered brand.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton