Adrian Portelli’s Preston site has dominated the fuel news cycle this fortnight. First 99 cents a litre, then 49.99 cents, an Instagram video kicking the price sign, supercars in the queue, police managing traffic. The coverage has framed it as cost of living relief, disruption of the majors, a billionaire taking on the big end of town.
I’ve spent the past week on the phone with ServoPro members in Melbourne who run sites within driving distance of Plenty Road. Their read is sharper than the media’s. The price stunt is the surface. What’s actually happening underneath is a membership business using fuel as a loss leader, and the regulatory framework around fuel retail is still working out how to deal with it.
The fuel is the bait, not the business
Members pay between $20 and $100 a month for the broader LMCT+ subscription, or roughly $99 a year for fuel only access. Those subscriptions get them into giveaways, retailer discounts, and now discounted fuel.
The maths only works one way. Wholesale unleaded into Melbourne is sitting around $1.60 to $1.70 a litre before freight, excise, card fees, and wages. Selling at 50 cents puts the loss per litre well over a dollar. No fuel retailer in Australia funds that out of forecourt margin. It comes from somewhere else.
One operator I spoke to put it plainly: the membership is the product, the fuel is the marketing spend. That reframes everything. It explains the loss leading, the social media theatre, and why expansion is being talked up before the first site has run a full month.
The Costco comparison doesn’t quite fit
The obvious parallel is Costco, which has run members only fuel in Australia for years. Members pay an annual fee, get access to discounted fuel along with everything else inside the warehouse, and Costco runs a profitable retail business across the whole offering. The fuel is a value add for the broader membership, not the entire reason for it.
LMCT+ is built differently. The membership was built around giveaway entries and prize promotions. Fuel has been bolted onto that model, sold below cost, to drive membership numbers. Costco discounts fuel modestly to reward members. LMCT+ is selling at a quarter of wholesale to attract them. Costco’s economics work because the warehouse model carries the fuel margin. The LMCT+ economics work only if the membership keeps growing fast enough to cover the fuel losses.
The Coles and Woolies parallel
There’s recent history closer to the LMCT+ structure. Coles and Woolworths ran shopper docket fuel discounts for years, subsidising fuel through supermarket margins. The ACCC eventually intervened on third line forcing grounds. The model used a discount on one product to drive sales in another, and the regulator took the view that distorted the fuel market.
The LMCT+ structure is similar in shape. Discounted fuel is being used to drive subscriptions to a separate business. Whether the ACCC takes the same view this time around is an open question, but it’s the question that matters.
The Servo Saver question
Victoria’s Servo Saver app, run by Consumer Affairs Victoria as part of the Fair Fuel Plan, has been live since October 2025. The principle is simple: fuel retailers report their prices in real time, motorists get a transparent view of what they’ll pay at the bowser, and the daily price cap stops mid day price hikes.
Servo Saver does flag members only sites. The app marks them clearly so motorists know access requires a subscription. The question the operators I spoke to are raising is whether a price of 49 cents, available only to people who’ve paid $99 for the privilege, sits comfortably in a public price comparison alongside publicly available prices, even with a label attached.
Independents in this state have spent the better part of a year working through the new reporting load. They’ve worn it because the principle is sound: transparent pricing for consumers. A subscription gated price posted at a quarter of the market rate stretches what that comparison is meant to do.
Where this lands
The members I spoke to aren’t worried about losing their customers. The Preston site is one location, the catchment is finite, and drivers from Geelong aren’t filling up in Preston. What they are worried about is the precedent. If a membership model that subsidises fuel below cost becomes the new template, every independent competes on a board where the headline price isn’t real.
For the members reading this, three things to take from it.
First, the price on the LMCT+ site has nothing to do with your cost base or your margin. If a customer asks why you can’t match it, the honest answer is that you sell fuel for a living and they sell memberships.
Second, the Costco comparison is the one to push back on. Costco built a retail business around its membership and fuel is part of it. LMCT+ has bolted fuel onto a giveaway business and called it disruption.
Third, watch the regulatory response. The third line forcing parallel with Coles and Woolies is real, and the ACCC has form on this exact structure.
Overall, the Preston site is a membership marketing campaign that happens to use fuel. The independents I spoke to aren’t panicking. They’re asking the right questions, and they’re asking them of the regulators, not of the bloke kicking the price sign on Instagram.