Please consider a free Ad supported tier if you are concerned about revenue vs value provide,
You could do something like a free ad supported tier which requires to manually start each solar charging session for which you have to watch a mandatory AD like a lot of freemium games do these days . This way you get a guranteed AD impression which support your ongoing costs.
The premium tier could be Ad free and support automated charging controls etc…
Hi Andrew, I would happily recommend this app for anyone with an EV and also to pay a one-off purchase for what is currently the free App (up to $50). I can’t stand subscriptions unless the value is greater than the cost, and it looks like the costs of the API are going to make that hard. As EV’s get more and more common, the support of an App like this wil become commonplace and $50 x tens if not 100’s of thousands is a tidy return for you.
While I love the Solar only capability, with free power opportunities now between 11am and 2pm this is of less importance to me (no doubt others also), so you chould pass on the subs charges accordingly and or decide to forego these capabilities if insufficient interest. Just because something is awesome doesnt mean it is economically viable.
You ought be charging for it now anyway as the possibility of car makers or power companies adding their own smart charging schedules is all the more likely. OVO is already trialling this and is only a step or 2 away from being a worthy replacement. Perhaps spruking your offering to them would be a smart idea (non-exclusive ideally as would want to be able to use no matter which power company I choose 
, gotta shop around)
Free is great, but short of that introducing other revenue to make it sustainable, I would prefer to back my idea and ask people to pay upfront with the option of other add-ons in time. I know I purchased the Stats App in the early days and would still recommend the much higher price today. I see Charge HQ in the same light.
All the best and hope you can work something out.
Adam
Michael - thanks for the kind words and feedback.
Some intelligence around prioritisation will definitely help maximise use of solar with multiple vehicles.
Also on the roadmap…
Homekit we hadn’t looked into but we do get a lot of requests for it.
Andrew
Thanks for the suggestions Kylish - we’ll have a closer look at the UK market.
If the centralised server is too expensive did you though of having a paid add on for home assistant, raspberry pi or your own os to run locally? Of course with a different sort of licencing but it could be an option ?
Yes, we’ve been thinking about this. The main hesitation is having confidence that there will be enough users who are a) willing to setup and run a Raspberry PI (or similar) that b) wouldn’t go down the Home Assistant / EVCC path instead.
it seems unfair for all the OCPP users to also cop a price increase to subsidise the costs that Tesla is imposing on their own customers to use their integrations.
Hi Jason - we hear you and we’re definitely considering different tiers for Tesla vs Non Tesla. Right now there’s a very small number of users with OCPP chargers so it’s a matter of believing we can grow this to make it viable if we don’t find a solution that works for Tesla users.
Thanks John - we’ll definitely have another look at non AU markets.
Thanks Cooper - I’ve setup a meeting now. Speak soon.
It’s hard to say as we’re mostly guessing at this point. Suffice to say, we’ll be offering fair and user-friendly options once we know where the pricing will land.
Thanks Wes - I agree, there’s more value for users who are Amber customers. Currently Amber customers only make up a small percentage of our users though and they’re also building a similar product themselves. We are in touch with them though.
It looks like dynamic market pricing is becoming more common in other countries so it’s something we’ll look at again.
Thanks for this, it’s another way to look at pricing that I’d not done previously. Super helpful.
I agree with you.
It’s crazy these EV Youtubers who just regurgitate news from other sources get paid a stack of money, but the ChargeHQ guys who have real operating costs (developers, servers, hosting, etc) are scrutinized over a few dollars per month. It’s really backwards logic. I too hope the CHQ team can find a model that rewards their efforts. In another thread, a guy said that CHQ saves him $10 month, then complained about it costing him $7/month to do. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. 
It’s interesting to see how different people perceive value. We initially expected the average user to save about $14/month on a $7/month spend, making it a no brainer, but figured anything down to a $7/month saving would still make it worthwhile, given you’re doing some good at the same time. Granted the savings have compressed since then for many users.
The required savings margin for some users is definitely higher than I expected.
My situation is a bit confusing, and I’m curious how this would all work (or how many are in the same boat).
I’m in NYC. ConEd (our utility) has a program that pays you back money if you only charge from midnight to 8am. Your app has been great for scheduling the charge for that reason. This is all I’ve needed the app for, and it works great, though it’s a very simple need.
Now, we recently got solar. Because of the reimbursement program, i still charge at night. To complicate matters, we don’t get paid money for electricity we give into the grid, though we do get credits we can use later.
Given what you said about how charging during the day will become cheaper, I’m confused about how the solar aspect of your app, which i know nothing about, could help people like me. I basically generate more than i use and am building up a big reserve, so the grid is basically like my backup battery.
I suspect i could be doing something differently, but I’m not sure what.
Judging by the feedback on their facebook group, it seems like they have their hands full getting the smartshift battery product to work they way customers want to. Hopefully this might be an opportunity for them to focus their dev resources on battery, and licence your tech, rather than spreading their resources thin and re-inventing the wheel here with car charging.
100% this. Amber (or any other similar electricity retailer in the world) needs to stop wasting their time with EV Charging and just license Charge HQ.
To all posters - be very weary about switching to a free EV charging period offer if you have solar and no home battery. Compared to the plan I am on (NSW Red Energy - Qantas FF plan time of use ) all of these plans have a higher daily service fee (about 10% higher), higher peak (53c v 63c /kwH) and higher shoulder (33c v around 37c) and lower feed in (about 7c v’s 5c). Yes while off peak is signifiactlly lower (or periods of zero cost) unless you are doing more than around 300km per week you’ll end up paying more overall in your power bill unless you have the ability to shift some of your peak and shoulder non EV usage to off peak. Do your sums carefully before you jump in to one of those plans.
Andrew and Jay - If you haven’t already I would suggest you reveiw any current grants availble from various Government agancies to see if you qualify for any. Here is a web site that may be helpfull.
I couldn’t agree more. You really have to build a model on your own energy usage profile.
Thank you @andrew for the tranparency and the challenges you face. While we are not solar users we find the application is superb for charging our Tesla when the price is right. One thing we have been looking into was a request from my partner to disable devices in the house when the power prices go up.
ChargeHQ focuses on solar, battery and charging. But it may be worth your while to expand your range to supporting the new IOT standard called matter. Just thinking outside the box. Maybe if you get into IOT you can offer a local matter hub/bridge where you pass on the current pricing and all the messaging/control is done from on-prem. That would allieviate a number of costs on your side as well and provide people with some peace of mind because control is on-prem. So a way to send messages to home devices would be a great step that would see your app take on a wider range of capability and functionality. In any case if API pricing is put in place for Tesla we will certainly pay for it.
We have TP-Link Tapo devices around the house which do not use any cloud service. The benefit being if the Internet goes dows they remain online and available. These are availble on amazon for $20 or so at the moment. We can get the same devices with matter support for close to the same money and would be prepared to do so if needed for Charge HQ to control them. However if I can retain control of my devices when the Internet goes offline that would be the preferred scenario. I am new to the tapo ecosystem but its cheap, effective and has worked flawlessly using the app.
Being able to control devices in the home when we are looking down the barrel of wildly variable energy prices woud be a godsend for us. I would be happy to pay money for a device with this capability. If you have seen Amber pricing lately you will know what I mean. Sure there are other devices out there but you come from a different viewpoint, a power driven one and managing energy consumption is rapidly becoming a conerstone of modern society.
I subscribed from the very start and believe you have done a great job with the app and I understand the intricacies of the various manufacturers. Thank you for creating and supporting a very practical need for the industry. The app does what I was doing manually keeping a balance between charging the house batteries and charging the car. It’s the convenience factor for me as Mother Nature just does her thing and we are effectively off the grid anyway.
