You're about to fill up in Gorizia. €1.789 per litre. A 50 L tank costs €89.45.
You cross the Italy–Slovenia border. No customs check, just a blue sign.
OMV station right past the border. €1.412 per litre. The same fill-up: €70.60.
Back to Gorizia: 5 km extra, roughly 0.4 L of extra fuel (€0.56). Zero tolls, zero vignettes.
Three borders, three calculations.
Weekly commuter IT→CH, 2 fill-ups/month
Border resident, regular cross-border fill-up
Weekend on the French Riviera, refuel on the way back
How we run the numbers.
Local vs cross-border prices
We take the price of the fuel you've chosen at your starting station and compare it with stations within 30 km on the other side of the border. Updated every 15 minutes.
Detour cost
The detour (A→B→A) burns extra fuel, and we subtract that extra from gross savings. We use your declared consumption or, if missing, 6 L/100 km, priced at the cross-border station.
Tolls and vignettes
Route tolls are subtracted from the net. We don't collect user data: costs are read from OSM, ACI and TCS for the suggested route.
Worth-it threshold
We flag the crossing as 'worth it' only if net savings exceed €1. Below that threshold the detour breaks even: no tangible gain.
Is it worth filling up across the border?
At Italy's borders the price spread is often wide: diesel in Slovenia or Switzerland can cost several cents per litre less than in Italy, and the same goes for petrol heading into France. But the posted price alone isn't enough to decide.
Rifuel starts from the gross saving and then subtracts the real cost of the detour (the extra fuel for the added kilometres) and any tolls or vignettes. It flags a crossing as worth it only when the net saving is above one euro: below that, the detour just breaks even.
You'll find the maths already done on real routes like Gorizia–Nova Gorica, Como–Chiasso and Ventimiglia–Menton, and you can run it with your own numbers using the calculator above: tank litres, detour, vehicle consumption and tolls.