The standing charge that’s stalling the EV rollout

The government wants more EV chargers. Drivers want more EV chargers. Businesses, landlords and local authorities are generally willing to host them. So why is the rollout still slower than it should be?

The answer most people reach for is hardware. Chargers are expensive. Installation is complex. Grid connections take time. These things are true, and they are also largely solved problems. The hardware cost has fallen steadily. Installation has become more routine. Grid connections are bureaucratic but navigable.

The friction that does not get talked about is software.

A fee before you earn a penny

Every EV charger needs a back office platform behind it. That platform handles payment processing, session management, energy reporting, driver authentication and a dozen other things a charger cannot do on its own. Without it, a charger is a piece of hardware bolted to a wall that cannot take a payment, cannot be monitored, and cannot comply with the UK’s Public Charge Point Regulations.

The dominant pricing model for that software is a monthly subscription per connector. Depending on the platform, that is somewhere between £5 and £15 per charger per month, regardless of whether anyone charges there.

For a large motorway service operator running fifty rapid chargers, this is a manageable line on a spreadsheet. For a small independent retailer putting in two AC chargers for their customers, or a housing association installing four chargers for a residential block, or a rural pub trying to attract EV drivers, it is a different kind of calculation entirely.

They pay the fee from day one. Revenue, if it comes at all, takes months to build. In the meantime, the software company has already decided that the small operator’s money is worth the same as the large operator’s, which sounds fair until you realise the small operator has no buffer and no leverage.

A lot of them do not proceed. Not because the economics of EV charging are bad. Because the economics of EV charging software, for small sites, are bad.

Who gets left out

The sites that fall away when software costs become a barrier are not the ones that would have failed anyway. They are the ones that are genuinely useful.

A destination charger at an independent cafe or garden centre does something a motorway charger does not. It changes behaviour. It gives a driver a reason to stop somewhere they might not otherwise have stopped. It turns a business into part of the charging network rather than a bystander to it.

Workplace chargers for small businesses have a similar profile. A fifty-person company that installs six chargers for staff is providing meaningful infrastructure for a group of drivers who cannot rely on home charging. That site will never have the utilisation figures of a public rapid hub. The software fee does not care about that distinction.

Community and residential sites are the most exposed. A residents’ association trying to serve a block of flats where most people cannot charge at home is providing genuine public benefit. They are also probably the least equipped to absorb a subscription cost before the first session takes place.

These are the sites the current market is pricing out. Slowly, without making headlines, and without anyone being obviously responsible for it.

What a different model looks like

The obvious alternative is to align the software provider’s income with the operator’s. No monthly fee. No per-device charge. A percentage of revenue taken only when revenue exists.

This is not a new idea in other markets. Payment processors have worked this way for decades. The logic is straightforward: if the platform only earns when the operator earns, the platform has a reason to care whether the operator succeeds.

Applied to EV charging software, it changes who can afford to participate. A small site with modest utilisation pays nothing in months where sessions are low. A community site providing free charging to residents pays a flat fee per session rather than a monthly standing charge against zero revenue. A business testing the economics of EV hosting before committing to a larger rollout can do so without absorbing platform costs before the experiment has started.

The sites that benefit most are the ones currently sitting outside the economics. Which, by a reasonable measure, are the ones the network most needs.

Why this matters beyond the charger count

The UK’s EV charging targets are about numbers. Chargers installed, connectors available, coverage achieved. Those are the right things to measure and they are genuinely improving.

What the numbers do not capture is where those chargers are and who they serve. A network that works well for high-volume sites and poorly for small, community and independent ones is not a bad network by the metrics. It is a bad network by the outcome.

Getting the software economics right for small operators is not a footnote to the rollout story. It is close to the centre of it. The destinations, workplaces and communities that have so far been priced into inaction represent a significant portion of the coverage gap. Fixing the commercial model that excludes them is one of the more direct things that can be done to close it.

That is what Inflo is built to do. We think it matters. We thought it was worth saying clearly.