About LiveRate: the petrol price in Pakistan, gold, dollar and crypto rates in one place

Checking the petrol price in Pakistan meant one site. The dollar rate meant another. Gold meant a third, and each one quoted a different unit in a different currency, usually with an advertisement sitting where the number should have been. None of them told you the thing that actually matters: these figures move together.

A weaker rupee lifts the cost of imported fuel and the local price of gold on the same morning. When you can only see one of those numbers at a time, you miss the connection entirely, and you end up thinking the pump price rose for no reason. Put them side by side and the pattern becomes obvious within a week of watching.

So we built one page. One currency selector that changes everything on it. A chart behind every figure, because a single day tells you almost nothing. If you want gold per tola in dirhams while reading petrol in rupees, that takes one click rather than a calculator and three browser tabs.

Six categories, each with its own tab, its own refresh cycle, and its own stated source. Nothing is estimated and nothing is filled in by hand.

Every figure on the site is fetched from a public source by an automated job. That matters more than it sounds. Manual entry is how a decimal point moves one place to the left and nobody notices for two days, and it is why a rates site with a person typing numbers into a spreadsheet will always be a day behind and occasionally wrong.

Fuel rates are read straight from the official notification, three times a day, so a midnight revision appears here in the morning without anyone being awake for it. Currency, metal and crypto prices are fetched fresh each time the page loads, which is why the timestamp in the header shows a time rather than a date. Crude oil settles once per trading day and is stored with the date it settled on.

Each section names what it is showing and how often that changes. The fuel cards say which notification they came from. The metal cards say per troy ounce in dollars before any conversion happens. The currency cards say mid-market. None of this is hidden in a footnote, because the single most common reason a rates page loses someone’s trust is that they cannot tell what they are looking at.

Four stages, and the second one is the reason the site is worth trusting.

A great deal of confusion about the gold rate in Pakistan comes down to units rather than prices. The international market quotes per troy ounce, which is 31.1035 grams. Pakistan and India buy by the tola, which is 11.6638 grams. Europe and much of the retail world work in grams and ten-gram bars. Three different numbers, one metal, none of them wrong.

So every figure on the site says which unit it is in, and the gold cards let you switch between tola, grams, ounces and kilograms without leaving the page. The unit even follows your currency: pick rupees, riyals or dirhams and the card offers tola, because that is how those markets buy. Pick euros and it offers grams.

The same thinking applies elsewhere. Fuel is always per litre, even for the countries that quote per gallon at home, because a comparison in mixed units is not a comparison at all. Crude is per barrel, which is roughly 159 litres, and the crude section does that division for you so you can see how much of a litre of petrol is actually oil.

This is the question behind most of the email we get, so it is worth stating plainly. The same asset has several prices at once, and which one is correct depends entirely on what you are about to do.

• Mid-market currency rate. The midpoint between what buyers pay and what sellers receive on the interbank market. This is what the site publishes, and it is the number the news quotes.
• Open-market counter rate. What a dealer in Karachi or Lahore quotes you across the counter. They buy slightly below the mid-market rate and sell slightly above it, usually one to three rupees apart. That spread is their margin, not an error.
• International gold spot. The global market price per troy ounce in dollars, before any local premium.
• Sarafa rate. Set locally, and usually carrying a premium over the converted spot price. Jewellery adds making charges on top of that again.
• Notified fuel rate. The official price per litre, uniform nationwide because of inland freight equalisation. A pump charging something else is the exception, not a regional difference.

Knowing which of these you need takes ten seconds and saves a great deal of arguing at a counter. If you are about to exchange cash, the counter rate is your number. If you are tracking whether the rupee is strengthening, the mid-market rate is.

Four groups open the site most days, and they want different numbers from the same page. That is exactly why everything shares one currency selector instead of living in separate tools.

• Anyone who drives. The notified petrol and diesel rate, and whether it moved last night. Under daily pricing that question has a new answer far more often than it used to.
• People sending money home. The riyal, dirham and pound against the rupee matter more day to day than the dollar does. Those sit on the same page with their own charts, and the converter presets the pair you use most.
• Anyone buying or holding gold. Spot in dollars is one thing; what a tola costs in rupees today is another. The site does that conversion rather than leaving it to you, and shows the year behind it so a jump is readable in context.
• People following crypto. Prices in dollars with a rupee conversion, plus the seven-day picture rather than a single frozen number that tells you nothing about direction.

There is a fifth group we did not expect: people who simply want to know whether a figure they saw on social media is real. A screenshot of a rate with no date and no source spreads quickly, and having one page to check it against turns out to be genuinely useful.

A rates site is only as good as the things it refuses to do. These are ours, and they are not marketing lines: each one has cost us a feature at some point.

• No estimated or filled-in prices. A missing value stays missing until the source publishes it. We removed thousands of generated history rows early on for exactly this reason, and the charts are shorter and honest because of it.
• No paid placement inside the rates. If we ever run advertising it will be clearly marked and kept away from the data. A rates page that quietly sells its numbers is worth nothing to anybody.
• No financial advice. We publish what the market is doing. Whether to buy gold, when to exchange dollars, or what any of it means for your situation is your call, and honestly nobody who tells you otherwise on a website should be trusted.
• No stale figures dressed as live ones. Every card carries the date or time its number came from. If something has not refreshed, it says so instead of quietly showing you yesterday.

Feeds go down. Sources change their page layout without warning. Occasionally a figure lands that should not have. When that happens we would rather hear about it quickly than have it sit there looking authoritative for a week.

Corrections are the most urgent thing in the inbox, ahead of anything commercial. We fix the figure, then reply and say what actually went wrong rather than quietly patching it and hoping nobody noticed. If it turns out not to be an error but a difference between markets, we explain which is which, because that is usually more useful than a correction would have been.

The quickest way to help us is a screenshot and the rough time. Rates move through the day, so knowing the moment you looked lets us check what the source was publishing right then rather than guessing.

The site is built around one page today. The plan is a set of focused pages: one for the petrol price in Pakistan on its own, one for each major remittance corridor such as the riyal and the dirham against the rupee, and a proper comparison page for fuel prices by country.

City-level gold rates are on the list too, since a national spot conversion is not quite the same as what a jeweller in Karachi or Lahore quotes on the day. Phone widgets are being looked at as well, so the petrol rate can sit on a home screen instead of requiring a visit.

Requests shape that order more than anything else. If something you check regularly is missing, telling us is genuinely the fastest way to get it built.