Looking for a Fuelly Alternative? Here's an Honest Comparison

Fuelly earned its place: the app began life in 2008 as Gas Cubby, one of the App Store's original gas trackers, and fuelly.com's real-world MPG database is still the first place many drivers check before buying a car. But in 2026 the uncomfortable question is being asked on Fuelly's own forums: is the service dying? If you're weighing an exit before the answer arrives the hard way, here's an honest comparison with Brimly — including what Fuelly still does that nobody else quite matches, and how to carry your logs across.

Why people are looking for an alternative

• The app is frozen. The current iPhone version, 3.3.7, shipped in June 2024 — over two years ago — and before that the app sat unchanged for roughly five years. It still supports iOS 9.3, is English-only, and has no widgets, no Apple Watch, no iPad layout. The Android app was removed from Google Play as outdated, and the team said it won't be updated.
• The website is decaying. Year selectors that stop before 2025, new model years that take months to appear, visible downtime. A promised "all-new apps" rewrite was announced for the end of 2025 and never arrived.
• Data loss keeps recurring. Three separate waves over a decade: the Gas Cubby 3.0 migration in 2016 ("wiped six years of data"), the forced-login switch in 2020 ("my data is hostage to an account"), and sync silently dropping entries in 2025. Because a Fuelly account and their server sit in the middle, your history is only as safe as their infrastructure — which is now running unattended.
• Ads inside a paid legacy. Users who bought Gas Cubby Pro outright watched the app they paid for grow banner ads and upsell interstitials — some appearing mid-fill-up-entry.

What Fuelly still does uniquely well

One thing, but a real one: the community MPG database. Around 636,000 vehicles' worth of owner-reported, real-world fuel economy — seventeen thousand Honda Civics, sixteen thousand F-150s — is something no app can replicate quickly, and it remains the honest pre-purchase reference. The Premium tier is also cheap ($7.99/year), though all it really does is remove the ads. If the database is the only thing you use, the website works without the app.

How Brimly is different

• It's alive, and it's iOS-first. Brimly is a modern SwiftUI app for iPhone — widgets, Live Activities for road trips, an on-device receipt scanner that turns a gas-station receipt into a logged fill-up in seconds, and nine interface languages. Fuelly's iOS baseline predates all of it by a decade.
• No account — by architecture, not policy. Brimly has no registration at all: your data lives on your device and syncs through your own private iCloud. The two failure modes that cost Fuelly users their history — a forced server account and an unattended backend — structurally cannot happen. And you're never locked in: full one-file export and CSV, any time.
• Factory fuel-economy data instead of waiting for crowds. Fuelly's answer to "what should this car consume?" is community reports; Brimly ships the manufacturer's declared figures (city/highway/combined, EPA-sourced, with the test cycle stated) for hundreds of engines, and shows your real consumption against that corridor — computed only between full tanks, so the number is honest. A 15–30% gap between lab and reality is normal, and Brimly says so instead of coloring it as a fault.
• OBD-II diagnostics — the single most-requested Fuelly feature, asked for on their forums since 2017 and never built. Brimly reads and clears trouble codes with an ELM327 adapter, shows live engine data, and its AI explains what a code means for your specific car.
• An AI assistant that knows your car. Grounded in a curated knowledge base of model-specific weak points and service schedules — you can try it free in the browser before installing.
• No ads, ever — and a one-time purchase. The free tier (two vehicles, full fuel log, stats, sync, widgets) carries no advertising. Offline power features come in Brimly Forever, a single one-time purchase; only the server-side AI needs a subscription. Nobody who paid once will ever watch ads appear in their app — that lesson is Fuelly's, and we've learned it.

How to move your Fuelly history to Brimly

Fuelly can export your logs as CSV — do it while the service is still up:

1. Export from Fuelly: in the iPhone app, Settings → Export Data emails you a CSV; on fuelly.com, your vehicle page offers a fuel-up export. Save the file where the Files app can see it.
2. In Brimly, open Settings → Import from another app (or "Coming from another app?" on the onboarding welcome screen) and pick the file.
3. Fuelly's CSV isn't a fixed format, so Brimly walks you through matching the columns — date, odometer, gallons or liters, total cost, partial fill-ups — and shows a full preview before anything is written.
4. Confirm. US and UK units are handled, consumption is recomputed between full tanks, and the import is free in every tier — switching should never cost money.

Who should stay on Fuelly

If your main use is researching a car before buying it, the fuelly.com database has no equal, and it's reasonable to keep using the site for lookups (Brimly's free car directory covers known problems, service schedules and factory consumption for 200+ models, but it doesn't crowdsource owner MPG). Likewise if you enter your fill-ups from a desktop browser — Brimly is deliberately an iPhone app with iCloud sync, not a web service. And at $7.99/year, Fuelly Premium is cheaper than any subscription; Brimly's answer is a different shape entirely — a free tier with no ads, and a one-time purchase instead of rent.

The bottom line

Fuelly's database deserves its reputation; the app around it has been left behind. If the tracker you open every week hasn't seen an update in two years, runs on borrowed time, and holds your history behind an account on an unattended server — the prudent move is to export a CSV today, whatever you decide to import it into. If you're on an iPhone, Brimly will take that CSV, keep your consumption math honest, remind you about service on schedule, and add the things Fuelly never got to — OBD diagnostics, a receipt scanner, and an AI that knows your specific car. We've written the same honest comparison for Fuelio and Drivvo switchers, too.