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

StorHub advertises a storage unit at $132 a month. The ongoing rate is $236.

Nobody is lying. Both numbers are on their website. The first is what you see while you're comparing. The second is what you pay from month four. Eighty-four percent of StorHub's listed units are sitting on an introductory rate right now.

We measure that distance every night. It needed a name, so it got one.

The reversion gap.

The cheapest provider isn't the cheapest provider

Sort Australian self-storage by advertised price and StorHub comes near the top — $132, second only to a single-facility operator in a beach town. Sort by what you actually pay once the promotion lapses and StorHub drops to third, behind two operators who never discounted at all.

Kennards looks expensive. Median advertised rate $354, near the bottom of the table. But only 3% of Kennards units carry an intro rate, and the ongoing rate is $359 — five dollars of movement. What you see is what you get.

National Storage advertises $156. It reverts to $252. Seventy-seven percent of its listings are on an intro rate.

Nationally the median advertised unit is $254 a month and the median ongoing rate is $300 — a gap of $46, on 89% of listings where we can observe both numbers. That is the industry's actual pricing model, sitting in plain sight, and until now nobody had counted it.

Why no operator will build this

The tool that lets a customer compare twenty providers on one screen is the same tool that tells that customer, some of the time, to sell their stuff instead of storing it.

That is an uncomfortable answer for anyone whose revenue depends on the opposite conclusion. So it doesn't get built. Not through conspiracy — through ordinary incentive. Every storage company has a comparison page. Every one of them ranks itself first.

Independence isn't positioning here. It's the entire product. The site works because it has nothing to sell you.

What's underneath

Twenty scrapers, one per provider, running nightly on a Celery schedule. Every one of them has broken at least once. Every one is monitored.

Underneath that, a Postgres record of every unit, every price, every change — which is what makes the reversion gap visible in the first place. A single snapshot shows you a price. A year of snapshots shows you a pattern.

On top: a Store-or-Sell calculator, a True Cost calculator, a size calculator, and an "Am I Overpaying?" check that compares a suburb against the national benchmark for a standardised nine square metre unit. There is a published methodology page, because a number without a method is just an assertion.

The whole thing runs on Railway and deploys from main. Built by one person, over evenings.

What Google thinks

1.08 million impressions in the last ninety days. 4,420 clicks. Average position 9.8.

That click-through rate is 0.4%, which sounds like failure and isn't — it's the signature of a site ranking on the second page for an enormous number of very specific queries. Somebody in Coburg searching for a 3x3 unit is a query worth winning. There are thousands of those.

Of 7,040 known pages, 1,460 are indexed. That's 20.7%, up from 14.5% in April — while the page count itself grew. The site indexed faster than it published.

Roughly ninety people a day use it. Modest. The dataset behind it is not.

Where it is now

Every night this thing records what Australian storage costs — by suburb, by unit size, by operator, advertised and ongoing. Nobody else has that time series. In two years it becomes the primary source on storage pricing in this country, which is the point, and which is why the traffic number matters less than it looks.

The current work is indexing and click-through. The moat is built. The distribution isn't.

StorHub's $132 unit is still advertised at $132. It still becomes $236. The difference is that now you can see it coming.

Try it: storageprices.au

Karl Howard · Reforged · 10 September 2026