Your Charger Is Idle Twenty Hours a Day

Most EV chargers are busy for a few hours a day.

A driveway charger runs overnight and sits still until the next evening. A charger in an apartment garage might serve one resident and stay idle the rest of the time. An office charger works during business hours and does nothing on weekends.

The hardware cost the same whether it runs one hour a day or twelve. The Host Program lets a charger earn during the hours it would otherwise sit unused.

▶ Watch the video

What the program actually is

You own a charger. You decide to let other people use it and pay you for the electricity. We handle finding those drivers, authorizing them, metering the session, taking the payment, and sending you the money.

You are the host. The people who charge at your charger are guests. That is the whole relationship.

It applies to three situations that look different but work the same underneath: a house with a driveway charger, a residential building with chargers in shared parking, and a business with chargers on its property.

You set a markup, not a price

You do not set a flat price for a charging session. You set a markup on the energy rate.

The energy rate is what the electricity costs. Your markup sits on top of that. A guest pays both, per kilowatt-hour, so someone who charges for twenty minutes pays less than someone who charges for two hours. Fair for the guest. Simple for you.

Every paid session also carries one flat $1 connection fee (C$1 in Canada), the same at every charger on the network. The guest pays it on top of your rate, and it never comes out of your share. It keeps the network monitored, supported and running around the clock, so your charger works every time a guest pulls in, and your markup stays whole.

Before a guest starts a session, their screen shows the full picture: the energy rate, your markup, the connection fee and the total. They see the price before they commit.

This matters more than it sounds. Hosts do not field complaints about surprise charges, because there are no surprises.

The markup applies to the energy portion only. Taxes and the connection fee are not marked up.

The split on a session

After card processing, you keep 85 percent of what guests pay for charging. EV Initiative keeps 15 percent.

That is true on every charger, in every kind of deployment, everywhere on the network. The $1 connection fee sits outside the split, paid by the guest, so your 85 percent is calculated on your rate and is never reduced by it.

Set an idle fee for cars that stay plugged in after they finish, and that revenue is split the same way. Your spot stays free for the next guest, and you earn when it does not.

Money moves to your bank account. During enrollment you connect a bank account through Stripe, which handles the payment processing and the payouts. Your share is paid session by session as each payment settles, and Stripe sends it to your bank on your account's payout schedule.

Real money in a real bank account. Not points, not app credit, not a gift card.

Who pays the service fee

Separate from the session split, there is a network service fee of eight dollars per month per plug, or eighty dollars a year, to keep a charger live on the network: monitored, metered, billed, and supported. AC or DC, the price is the same. Most of the industry charges more, and most charge more for DC than AC.

Who actually pays it depends on who owns the deployment, and in most cases it is not the person reading this.

A single-family home pays nothing monthly. You earn on guest charging, and in Canada you earn on carbon credits, and no service fee comes back at you.

A multifamily building carries the per-plug fee, because the building is running shared infrastructure that serves many drivers. Some buildings pass that cost through to a resident who installed their own charger. That is the building's arrangement to make, not ours.

A host site pays nothing. A business that receives chargers for its people at no cost is not the party carrying the service fee. Whoever owns that deployment carries it.

No setup fees buried in a contract. No separate line items that appear three months in.

Your own charging is free

When you charge your own car at your own charger, the session costs nothing. No platform fee, no markup, no connection fee, no payment at all. The system recognizes the owner and settles the session at zero.

This is worth stating clearly because it is the first question most people ask. Opening your charger to guests does not mean you start paying to use your own equipment.

The four controls

Price

Your markup, per kilowatt-hour, set by you and changeable whenever you want.

Hours

You decide when guests can charge. We call these guest windows, and you set them by day and by hour. A homeowner might open the charger from nine to five on weekdays, when the car is gone and the driveway is free, then close it evenings and weekends when the family needs it. An office might do the opposite: closed during business hours when employees need the chargers, open evenings and weekends to the neighbourhood.

Outside your window, a guest cannot start a session. The charger simply does not authorize them.

The free pass list

You can add up to a hundred people who charge free at your charger. Family. Friends. A neighbour. A tenant. Someone who helps you out and you would rather not charge.

Two things make this list more useful than it first appears. People on it charge free at any time, and your guest hours do not apply to them. So a charger that is closed to the public overnight is still open to your brother at two in the morning.

The pass list runs alongside the paid side, not instead of it. You can have a charger that is free for fifteen people you know and paid for everyone else, and both work at once.

On and off

Guest access is a switch. Open the charger when you want the income, close it when you want privacy, change your mind as often as you like.

Different situations, same mechanics

A house. One charger, one driveway. The owner opens it during working hours, keeps a pass list for family, and closes it evenings. The income is modest per session and adds up over a year.

An apartment or condo building. Multiple chargers in shared parking. Residents charge, visitors charge, and the building gets its electricity back on every session. The volume is much higher than a single home because there are more chargers and more drivers.

A business. Chargers in a customer or employee lot. A retail site might open chargers to the public to draw traffic. An office might open them evenings and weekends when staff are gone.

The platform does not treat these as different products. Same host mechanics, different settings.

What you are responsible for

This part deserves to be stated directly rather than buried in a terms page.

EV Initiative is a software platform. We run the network, process the payments, meter the sessions, and move the money. We are not a party to the arrangement between you and the people who charge at your property.

The charger is yours. The property is yours. The relationship with the guest is yours. If something goes wrong between you and a guest, including damage to a vehicle, damage to your property, or an injury on your premises, that sits between the two of you. We do not insure your property, we do not inspect or maintain your hardware, and we do not vouch for how guests will behave.

You are also responsible for the accuracy of the price you set, for who you give access to, and for any tax obligations on what you earn.

Check before you enroll

Not everyone is allowed to do this, and finding out afterward is the wrong order.

Some residential leases prohibit running a commercial activity at the property. Some condo corporations and homeowners associations restrict what you can do with shared or assigned parking. Some jurisdictions regulate reselling electricity, and the rules vary by state and province.

Confirming you are permitted to host paid charging at your address is your responsibility. It is usually a short conversation with a landlord, a property manager, or a condo board. Worth having before you enroll rather than after a neighbour complains.

How enrollment works

1. Open the app and enroll your charger in the program.
2. Connect a bank account through Stripe. Standard Stripe onboarding: identity verification and bank details, handled by Stripe rather than by us.
3. Set your markup and your guest hours.
4. Build your free pass list if you want one.
5. Accept the terms, which include the responsibilities described above.
6. Flip the charger open to guests.

From that point the charger is discoverable to drivers on the network during the hours you set, and the money starts moving to your account.

Common questions

Do I pay to use my own charger? No. Your own charging is free. The platform fee applies only to what guests pay you.

What is the $1 connection fee? A flat fee on every paid session, the same everywhere on the network (C$1 in Canada). The guest pays it on top of your rate. It is not taken from your 85 percent.

Do I pay a monthly fee? If your charger is at a single-family home, no. In a building, the per-plug service fee sits with the building, and some buildings pass it through to a resident who owns their own charger. At a host site, whoever owns the deployment carries it.

Can I charge different people different prices? You set one markup for guests. The pass list is your free tier. So you have two prices: free for people on the list, and your rate for everyone else.

What if I only want a few specific people to use it? Put them on the free pass list and leave guest access closed. The charger serves the people you chose and nobody else, and no money changes hands.

Can I change my price later? Yes, whenever you want. The price a guest sees is the price in effect when they start their session.

What happens if a guest damages something? That is between you and the guest. The platform processes the payment and is not part of the arrangement. This is why it is worth thinking about who has access to your property and when.

How quickly do I get paid? Session by session, as each payment settles, through your connected Stripe account.

Do I need a special charger? It needs to be a networked charger on the EV Initiative platform. Hardware requirements are on the site.

Getting started

If you already have an EV Initiative charger, enrolling is a settings change and takes a few minutes. If you are still deciding on hardware, start there and the program is waiting when the charger goes live.

A charger that sits idle twenty hours a day is a depreciating asset. This is how it stops being one.