Pricing
To view the Pricing page, click Pricing in the sidebar. There are two main sections in the Pricing page: Pricing rules and Discounts.
Overview
Pricing rules determine the cost of EV charging sessions for the EV drivers that use your chargers. Every pricing rule in the dashboard has the following attributes:
- A rule name set by dashboard users to identify the pricing rule.
- A list of chargers that the pricing rule will apply to. When setting up your pricing rules, you can select individual chargers or entire sites.
- A pricing schedule. The dashboard supports billing different prices at different times during the day or week. You can set per-day pricing, weekdays/weekend pricing, or the same pricing every day. Within each of these options, you can also customize pricing down to each minute.
- A rate, which is the dollar amount that will be billed, and can be determine three ways:
- Per hour spent plugged in.
- Per effective hour charging. This is where drivers will be billed for the time when their car is drawing power. The hourly rate will be adjusted pro-rata as the car draws less power. For example, if the car’s charge slows to half of the normal kW rate, the hourly price is similarly adjusted by half.
- Per kWh delivered to the car battery. A kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the unit of energy used to measure EV battery capacity.
Please be aware of your local rules and regulations regarding setting pricing for your chargers. There are many jurisdictions in which billing per kWh is currently disallowed.
Note: The per effective hour charging pricing rule is not a CTEP-compliant billing model.
Implementing pricing rules
To create a new pricing rule, click Add rule in the top-right corner of the Pricing page.
Choose a name for your new rule and type it into the Rule name field. The rule name should help you or other dashboard users in the future remember why this rule was created or which group of chargers it controls.
Click the dropdown that says Select chargers to choose which EV chargers this new pricing rule should apply to. Use the tick boxes to select entire sites or individual chargers, or search for a specific charger using the search field. There is no limit to the number of chargers you can include in a pricing rule.
Once you are finished creating your new pricing rule, remember to click Save before exiting the window.
Rule Descriptions
There are three types of pricing rules:
1. Free
The charger(s) will be free to use for all drivers.
2. Time-of-Use
The charger(s) will be set per day. For example, with per-day pricing a separate column will appear for each day of the week.
You may enter as many pricing periods as you need to set detailed time-of-use pricing schedules. For each pricing period, choose a rate, start time, and end time. Using the Add pricing period pop-up, you can also duplicate a pricing period across multiple days or group of days by clicking the tickboxes in the Save to row.
A finished pricing rule can be as simple as a single price all day, every day. Or it can be as complicated as the schedule below, mixing kWh pricing and per hour pricing across a dozen pricing periods
3. Tiered
The charger(s) will have a variable price within a single charging session.
With tiered pricing, EV drivers are billed different rates depending on how long they stay plugged in for. For example, you can create a tiered pricing rate where drivers are billed $1.00 for their first 3 hours of charging, followed by $3.00 for the next 2 hours, followed by another rate for the remainder of the session.
Tiered pricing can be set by price per hour charging, price per hour plugged in, or price per kWh. You can set as many tiers as you would like.
Note: Tiered pricing is not a CTEP-certified function.
Idle fees
Idle fees option can be enabled and set up per minute for new and existing pricing rules. Once enabled, drivers will be charged idle fees when charging appears to be done. A charger begins idling when there are consecutive meter values with less than 7000 joules dispensed per meter value over one minute.
There are price guardrails when setting up idle fees to ensure a fair price is set for drivers. The maximum idle fee price is $1.50 (CAD and USD).
Drivers can view idle fees prior to charging in the pricing breakdown when viewing a charger in the app. After starting a session with idle fees, drivers will also see accumulated idle fees during a session and in the receipt. Drivers will be given a 15 min grace period when charging is done before idle fees kick in. When idle fees are enabled, drivers will be notified on the apps and through an SMS notification to the phone number in their account when their charging is completed and the idle state has begun, and again after the grace period when idle fees begin. Drivers will not incur idle fees if they stop the session before or within the grace period.
Editing pricing rules
In addition to creating as many pricing rules as you need, you can edit existing pricing rules. To edit a pricing rule, navigate to the main Pricing page and click the ... button in the top-right corner of the pricing rule’s box.
While the dashboard's pricing engine is very powerful, we recommend simple pricing rules if you are a new site host. Too many pricing periods can confuse drivers and create frustration.