StoragePrices.au — the price comparison no storage company will build

Type a suburb. See what every self-storage provider in that suburb actually charges, today, for every unit size they have available. No quote form. No callback. No "prices vary, call for details." Just the numbers, sitting on the page, refreshed nightly.

Live at storageprices.au. Fourteen providers, 1,263 facilities, 11,954 unit prices in the cache. Built by one person over a year of evenings.

Why it exists

The self-storage industry has a funny relationship with price. The unit on the website is a teaser. The real price comes after you phone up, get talked through "promotional rates," and discover three months later that the rent has jumped 22%. This isn't a secret. It's the standard playbook.

No storage company is going to build the tool that fixes this. The tool that helps a customer compare fourteen providers in one screen is the tool that tells that same customer, some of the time, that they should sell their stuff instead of storing it. That's an uncomfortable answer for anyone whose revenue depends on the opposite conclusion.

So I built it. Independence isn't a marketing line here — it's the entire product. The site works because it has no incentive to lie to you.

What's inside

Underneath the simple search box is a stack that took more work than it looks:

• Fourteen live scrapers, one per provider, running nightly on a Celery schedule. Every one of them broke at least once. Every one of them is monitored.
• A Postgres cache of every unit, every price, every change — so when a price moves, we notice, and we can tell the customer.
• Three contrarian tools no provider will ever ship: a Store-or-Sell calculator (is your stuff worth more than the rent?), a True Cost calculator (what will this actually cost over two years, not two months?), and a Size calculator.
• A B2B API — JWT-authenticated, full CRUD on facilities and units — so independent operators can plug their real-time availability into the comparison without building their own infrastructure.

One of those contrarian tools, rendering a real result for a real suburb:

The whole thing runs on Railway, deploys from main, and currently serves around 90 daily users and 37 organic searches a day. Modest numbers. The interesting ones are 51,000 Google impressions and a 14.5% indexing rate — which means 85% of the content Google hasn't seen yet. That bottleneck is the current sprint.

Why it's interesting

Three things, in order of leverage.

One: the site is a wedge into an industry that has been allowed to write its own rules for two decades. Once consumers can compare, the rules change on their own.

Two: it's a permanent research instrument. Every night, it records what Australian storage costs, state by state, unit size by unit size. Nobody else has that time series. After two years of nightly snapshots, the dataset becomes the primary source on storage pricing in Australia — feeding directly into the Storage Intelligence platform.

Three: it's the cleanest possible demonstration of a single idea — that neutral infrastructure, built by someone with no product to push, can reshape a market without asking for permission. No marketing. No launch. Just a URL, the truth, and Google.

Status

Live and growing. Current sprint is indexing and click-through — making the 800-odd unindexed pages worth showing to Google, and making the ones that rank actually get clicked. B2B operator features are live but paused until consumer traffic hits 500 daily. The moat is built. The work now is distribution.

Try it: storageprices.au.

The shape — scrape, reconcile, publish, refuse to lie — transfers to any opaque consumer market. If that's your category, let's talk.

Karl Howard · Reforged · 14 April 2026