CarSpending.com: Service to track vehicle costs, fuel consumption and much more

News and announcements Yii-powered Applications
1

Hey, guys!

It’s time to finally present my project - one idea of mine for which thankfully I chose Yii after researching quite few frameworks (and I had previous experience with more then 5 mature MVC frameworks). It’s a project that I do in my spare time, as a hobby, for over just about one year so far.

The project home page is:

http://www.carspending.com/

So, it’s a service that helps you keep track of your vehicle expenses (car, motorbike, commercial vehicle). You can enter your fill-ups and it will show your vehicle fuel consumption. Soon you will, and soon you will be able to enter all kinds of other expenses, like repairs, maintenance costs, purchases, insurances, texes etc and create reminders to receive different kinds of notifications when something should be done on your vehicle. It aim’s to be a robust, socially integrated online service book that could also pull statistics for users that want to just check real data about some vehicles.

It’s also fully internationalized - supports all kinds of currencies, locales, measurement units (for consumption, distance, quantity per fuel type) and currently it’s in two languages - English and Bulgarian, but I will expose at some point interface that would allow anyone to translate the service and prepare a localized settings-pack for any country.

I also should say that the project is in early beta (more of an alpha) stage, and I’m not telling many of the things it could and it would soon do, as I prefer to instead explain them once they are finished.

This is my personal car with some data:

http://www.carspending.com/en/profiles/CarSpending/1-honda-accord-i-ctdi-executive

And this is my public profile:

http://www.carspending.com/en/profiles/CarSpending

What I haven’t mentioned is that when you enter fill-ups, you could point the filling station on the map (yep, Google Maps integration) - so if you actually intend to use it, you could tell me your country and the major filling-station brands so that I can import some venues. Any bug reports and suggestions are welcomed - either here or using the feedback button on the left of the site screen where it would be easier for me to keep track of them. Basically I’m pushing this post to get more feedback and to know if I’m going in the right direction.

Finally special thanks to Qiang for this amazing framework, and many thanks for the help during the development to all you guys in the IRC channel - especially rawtaz and onre! Soon I think I will be writing more code that is useful for more general things and I will share it as extensions or wiki articles.

2

Really good work man, it’s lovely to see how this has evolved from the initial application skeleton you started some time ago into a real site with a complex database behind its current and upcoming features. Keep it up!

3

Now I added the ability to add other vehicle costs as repairs, maintenance, purchases and even tuning! Any feedback is appreciated.

4

I like your idea for website, it can be useful in real life. Maybe you should add web api, and create mobile website, so users can add their spending while they are still on road(for example just after they bought gasoline).

5

Both mobile site and public API are in the plans. I will co-develop an Android app with a friend, we will design the API on the way. I will post in this thread for all the bigger updates of the service :)

6

Nice idea. I love my car so I think I will start using your website. Although, I don’t think I will like the results. Rotary engines are very inefficient engines - I have a Mazda RX8. Fun to drive, not fun to pay for fuel :(

7

I would love to see that car in the site! I was considering to get a second hand RX-8 myself (I still haven’t went off that idea) only thing that stops me is the fear of engine problems that no one around would be able to care of.

BTW the project will be presented tomorrow at the monthly OpenCoffee event in Sofia, Bulgaria, in front of about 50 IT people and entrepreneurs. I hope at least it to gain some attention and mentions of it in the web space, wish me luck :)

8

With the RX8 I always service it at a genuine Mazda dealer. No-one else really knows the rotary engines as well.

Good luck with your OpenCoffee presentation.

9

While I’m working on few very big things on the project, I uploaded few smaller improvements that were done aside.

  • Now there is complete control over the privacy of data of the vehicle (what info to show and what not)

  • In the table of fueling entries there are icons that show the urban and suburban driving (if you have entered those)

  • You could delete your vehicles now

  • Many other small fixes and improvements

10

Many things have been done on the system, which will soon have its 1000th registered user & vehicle. I would really appreciate your support and feedback guys!

11

Already 3 million kilometers of tracked vehicles data and about 2000 users. And the data/users are growing faster month by month. Two more devs got on the team of the development of the project.

I’m really pleased with choosing Yii for this project :)