Adrian Portelli Just Opened a 99.9 Cent Petrol Station. Here's What the Numbers Actually Say
Adrian Portelli has put up a pump sign that reads 99.9 cents per litre for unleaded. In Melbourne. In April 2026. With the suburban average sitting around 190 cents, the number stops people in the carpark. It's supposed to. The sign isn't a price, it's a billboard, and Portelli has been paying for billboards like this since the first Lambo giveaway.
But strip the theatre away and 99.9 cents is an extremely specific number. It's almost exactly what the arithmetic says you can charge right now without bleeding more per litre than a typical LMCT+ monthly fee collects. That isn't a coincidence. And the timing, I think, is the real story.
Let me walk through it.
What 99.9 cents actually leaves in the till
Every litre of petrol sold in Australia gives up three chunks of money before the retailer sees any margin.
The first is GST. Fuel is an ordinary taxable supply, so ten per cent of the retail price flows straight to the ATO. Out of 99.9 cents, that's 9.08 cents gone, leaving 90.82 cents in the till.
The second is fuel excise. This is the federal road funding charge that sits on every litre. Normally it's 52.6 cents. From 1 April through 30 June 2026 the Albanese government halved it to 20.6 cents as part of the three month relief package. So right now, today, the excise on a 99.9 cent litre is 20.6 cents. That takes us from 90.82 cents down to 70.22 cents available for everything else.
The third is the actual petrol. The commodity cost, the refining margin, the pipeline to Melbourne, the tanker out to the site. The industry calls this the product cost, and the price published by refineries is the Terminal Gate Price, or TGP. In Victoria, TGP for unleaded in the week I'm writing this has been trading around 140 to 145 cents per litre inclusive of the halved excise. Back out the 20.6 cents of excise and you get a product only cost sitting in the high 80 to low 90 cent range for anyone buying at standard TGP.
Now the arithmetic.
* LMCT+ sells the litre at 99.9 cents.
* Minus 9.08 cents GST leaves 90.82.
* Minus 20.6 cents excise leaves 70.22.
* Minus roughly 90 cents product cost and the retailer is running at a loss of around 20 cents per litre.
On a 60 litre fill that's a 12 dollar subsidy for every tank. If a member fills up twice a month, LMCT+ is burning roughly 24 dollars per active member per month on fuel alone.
That's the situation while the halved excise holds.
The cliff is 1 July
On 1 July the halved excise expires unless the government extends it. Every public signal from Treasury so far has said no. The headline motivated the relief package. Extending it would blow a hole in the budget twice over.
Run the arithmetic again with excise back at 52.6 cents.
* 99.9 cents retail.
* Minus 9.08 GST.
* Minus 52.6 excise.
* Leaves 38.22 cents for product cost and every other operating expense.
Even if LMCT+ holds the best TGP deal available in the country, 38 cents does not cover the product. The loss widens from roughly 20 cents per litre to something like 55 cents per litre. The 12 dollar subsidy per tank becomes a 33 dollar subsidy per tank. A member filling up twice a month costs LMCT+ around 66 dollars against whatever the membership actually collects.
This is the piece I don't think the headlines have noticed yet. The 99.9 cent price isn't an impossible number. It's a number that barely works right now and stops working entirely in about ten weeks.
Which means one of three things is true. Either LMCT+ quietly lifts the pump price on 1 July and the headline returns to whatever the new number is. Or Portelli wears a much bigger subsidy for as long as the brand impact pays off. Or the launch was always designed as a time boxed stunt, in which case the clock is already running and everyone involved knows it.
The business isn't petrol. It's the list.
Step back from the pump for a moment. LMCT+ is a paid subscription business that runs competitions. Members pay a monthly fee for eligibility in raffles for cars, houses, cash and one off drops like the Lamborghini giveaways Portelli is best known for. The fuel station isn't a new business line. It's a retention tool for the existing one.
Think of it in the same way streaming services think about loss leading original content. Netflix doesn't expect its expensive originals to recoup through DVD sales. It expects them to keep a household subscribed through another billing cycle, because the cost of acquiring a replacement household is higher than producing the show. The fuel station is Netflix Originals with a forecourt on top.
A very rough calculation on the LMCT+ side. If the average member pays somewhere around 20 dollars per month and the fuel subsidy during the relief window runs at 24 dollars per active fuel user per month, the subsidy is slightly net negative before counting raffle entry revenue or merchandise. It's not a profitable fuel station, but it's also not a ruinous one. After 1 July, if LMCT+ holds the 99.9 cent price, the monthly loss per active fuel user jumps to around 66 dollars. That's ruinous unless it's paid for out of brand budget.
Viewed as customer acquisition cost for a subscription product, the numbers read differently. A typical Australian direct to consumer subscription business spends somewhere between 40 and 200 dollars to acquire a net new paying member. If the fuel station pulls in members who stay subscribed for an average of 12 months at 20 dollars a month, that's 240 dollars in lifetime revenue against roughly 30 to 60 dollars of fuel subsidy to hook them during the launch period. Those are attractive CAC to LTV numbers by consumer subscription standards, provided retention holds up.
Retention is where the station actually earns its keep. A member who fills up at LMCT+ once a week has a meaningful ongoing reason to keep the subscription live. That beats giveaways alone, because a raffle is a discrete hit of dopamine every few months. A fuel discount is a weekly transactional anchor that shows up in the family budget spreadsheet.
Where the wholesale petrol comes from
One of the questions I wanted to answer before writing any of this was the supply side. Who sells LMCT+ the fuel? Nobody is going to set up a refinery for Portelli's pet project, so the petrol is being bought from someone, and whoever that someone is matters.
Australia has two practical paths to retail supply. Path one is a direct contract with a major. BP, Viva, Ampol and Mobil each run wholesale programs for their franchised and branded independents, typically quoting off the daily TGP with a small supply margin. Path two is a commercial supply agreement with one of the independents who themselves buy in bulk, most commonly United, Liberty or Puma. Independents don't refine, but they have big enough volumes to get competitive TGP terms from the majors and resell.
Given LMCT+ isn't running a multi site network yet, the economics almost certainly point to path two. A single site supply agreement from one of the independents, probably at a small margin over TGP. That gets LMCT+ product for somewhere near standard TGP plus two or three cents. It does not get them a sweetheart deal. You need volume to unlock volume pricing, and a single station in suburban Melbourne does not move the needle on anyone's monthly supply book.
This is important because it means LMCT+ can't solve the post July cliff by negotiating harder on supply. They're already paying close to the cheapest achievable rate for a single site. The only lever is the pump price, or the membership fee, or the size of the brand budget subsidising the whole thing.
Is this actually disruption
The word disruption gets thrown around whenever something novel happens in a sleepy sector, and Australian fuel retailing is about as sleepy as it gets. Four majors and a handful of independents, prices that move in loose cycles the ACCC monitors quarterly, and a consumer base that has mostly given up on expecting anything interesting from the forecourt.
LMCT+ at 99.9 cents is interesting. But I'm not sure it's disruption in the sense of a business model that incumbents can't answer.
A single station in Melbourne operating as a membership loss leader inside a broader subscription business doesn't threaten incumbent volumes. BP alone runs more than 1,400 sites nationally. Even if the LMCT+ station runs at full capacity of perhaps 6 to 8 million litres per year, that's a rounding error against a national market of roughly 30 billion litres. The price at every other Melbourne station continues to be set by crude, TGP and the local cycle, not by what Portelli is doing in his one shopfront. If you want to understand how those flips actually land for your own suburb, the data trail is clearest in the official feeds we pull through for our Victoria state page and the broader price trends breakdown.
The real disruption test isn't whether the price is lower. It's whether the model can replicate. If LMCT+ opens ten stations, fifty, a hundred, the question of whether the subscription can carry the fuel subsidy gets stress tested fast. Current membership count is reportedly in the hundreds of thousands, which sounds big but divides very thinly once you spread it across a national network filling tanks at a 20 to 55 cent loss per litre.
Compare it to Costco, which runs member priced petrol stations across a handful of locations already. Costco's model works because the fuel margin is slim but positive, the supply chain is backed by a 250 billion dollar global grocery and wholesale business, and the membership fee is structured to cover the cost of the discount rather than subsidise it below cost. LMCT+ is doing something genuinely different. Not a thinner margin. A negative margin, paid for by the broader subscription.
That's closer to what streaming services did to cable than what Costco did to supermarkets. Cheap content subsidised by subscription fees, funded first by venture capital and eventually by the streaming bundle's own balance sheet. It can work at small scale as marketing spend. It is much harder to scale into a price that reshapes a whole category, because the numbers get bigger but the subscription doesn't.
What the majors should be watching
Not the pump price. That's the bit that makes the news and, for the reasons above, won't scale. What the majors should watch is whether consumers start thinking about fuel as something that comes with a subscription.
Supermarket fuel stations already trained Australian consumers to associate petrol with loyalty points, in store discounts and app based fuel locks. LMCT+ is nudging the same psychology one step further. Petrol becomes a perk of being inside someone's ecosystem, not a commodity you buy from whoever is closest. If that framing catches on more broadly, the price cycle becomes less important than which ecosystem has you on their list.
Three scenarios worth thinking about from a major's perspective.
First, Coles or Woolies running a tighter subscription. Coles Plus or Woolworths Everyday Extra at a price point that includes fuel discounts deeper than the current four cents per litre is a plausible response if membership fuel becomes a recognised category.
Second, an aggregator model where someone bundles fuel with car insurance, car servicing, tolls and roadside. NRMA, RACV and RAA all have the infrastructure. None of them has pressed hard on the fuel angle, because the margin economics don't currently support it. If LMCT+ proves the subscription can carry the fuel, that assumption gets revisited.
Third, the regulatory question. The ACCC has been looking at fuel pricing cycles for years and has consistently found them to be within the bounds of competitive behaviour, if not exactly consumer friendly. A below cost loss leader subsidised from an unrelated subscription is not the ACCC's usual beat, but it does invite the question of whether petrol retailing should be ring fenced from cross subsidy. That's a political question before it's a regulatory one.
None of these scenarios are urgent today. But the fact that LMCT+ has demonstrated 99.9 cents is technically possible, even for a short window, shifts the conversation.
What it means if you drive
For members of LMCT+, it's a genuinely good deal for the next ten weeks. A full tank at 99.9 cents beats whatever else is on offer by a comfortable margin, and if the membership was already paying for itself through raffle entries or content access, the fuel discount is pure upside. Keep an eye on the price after 1 July. That is the point at which the economics force a decision.
For everyone else, nothing changes at the local station tomorrow, next week or in three months. A single site running at this price doesn't move the cycle. Melbourne metro prices will still flip on their usual rhythm, with early morning updates rolling through between roughly six and eight am on turn days. Your best value is still catching the cheap end of the cycle, which the best time to fill up guide covers in detail.
The broader market question is whether more stations join the movement. I'm sceptical. The economics only work inside a subscription business with an existing member base large enough to carry the subsidy, and those are rare. Outside of LMCT+, the obvious candidates are large loyalty programs, supermarkets and motoring clubs. Watch whether any of them make a move in the back half of 2026.
The ten week question
Come 1 July, LMCT+ faces a simple choice. Hold 99.9 cents and wear a subsidy of around 55 cents per litre, which at even modest volumes burns cash faster than the membership fee collects it. Lift the price in line with the reverted excise, which lands somewhere around 132 to 135 cents on the same cost base, still well below market but no longer a headline. Or shift the offer to something else entirely, maybe a fixed member discount off the day's cheapest equivalent, maybe a monthly fuel credit included in higher subscription tiers.
My guess, and I'm stressing it's a guess, is the pump price quietly moves on 1 July, settles somewhere around 140 cents, and the marketing message shifts from flat rate 99.9 cents to largest member discount in Australia or something close. The current number exists to make people talk about it, which they are. Once that job is done, the number can change.
The more interesting question isn't what the pump price does in July. It is whether any of the incumbents take the experiment seriously enough to launch a response before the relief period ends. If an Australian motoring club or a supermarket chain rolls a subscription backed fuel discount into the market in the next three months, that's the disruption signal. If nothing appears, the sector goes on treating this as a one off stunt, and the one off stunt either folds or finds a quieter steady state.
Either way, the 99.9 cent price is one of the more economically revealing marketing moves I've seen in Australian fuel retail this year. The arithmetic is visible if you do the work. The timing is elegant if you know the excise calendar. The business model is consistent with everything else Portelli has done. What remains open is whether it goes from a single station talking point to a category shaping force. I wouldn't bet either way today.
I would bet on the sign pulling a lot of cars for the next ten weeks.
