As a distributor in the EV charging space, I have visibility into a wide range of projects across commercial, multifamily, fleet, municipal, utility, and public charging applications. Like any construction-driven market, EV infrastructure projects face hurdles from early development through commissioning and closeout. Some of these challenges are regulatory. Others are tied to utility timelines, permitting, site conditions, equipment availability, or funding structures.
Others, however, are self-inflicted by the very industry trying to accelerate adoption.
One of those self-inflicted barriers is the prepaid software agreement, or traditional SaaS model, for EV charging management platforms.
SaaS is familiar and attractive for understandable reasons. It creates recurring revenue, improves revenue predictability, supports customer retention, and produces the financial metrics investors often value. For many software categories, that structure makes sense.
EV charging infrastructure is not just another software subscription category. It is a capital-intensive, construction-based, utilization-dependent market that is still maturing. When we impose long-term prepaid software costs on site owners before utilization is proven, we shift too much risk onto the customer. In doing so, we create friction that can slow installations, discourage expansion, and contribute to underutilized or abandoned charging assets.
Put simply, traditional SaaS models often do not match the realities of EV charging deployment.
In many states, EV charging infrastructure is already being driven by building codes, local ordinances, utility programs, and new construction requirements. Property owners, developers, and multifamily operators are increasingly required to install charging infrastructure as part of new construction or major alterations. That requirement already adds cost to projects through make-ready work, electrical upgrades, switchgear, trenching, conduit, networking, hardware, labor, engineering, and utility coordination.
Layering a long-term software obligation on top of those costs can make the industry look disconnected from the customer’s financial reality. As an industry, our focus should be on reducing barriers to deployment, not adding new ones. We should be working with states, utilities, developers, and property owners to maximize rebates, grants, make-ready incentives, and practical deployment strategies that get more chargers in the ground.
The goal should be simple, more reliable, accessible, and financially sustainable charging infrastructure.
That requires software pricing models that reflect how charging assets actually perform.
For many site hosts, especially outside of dedicated fleet applications, the core software needs are practical and measurable. Operators care about demand-charge management, time-of-use rates, access control, uptime visibility, payment processing, idle fees, reporting, and load management. These tools matter. The pricing structure should reflect the value they create.
That is why the market should move faster toward flexible, usage-based software pricing.
A usage-based fee, or UBF, is not a radical concept. Several software providers already use variations of it, and some are gaining ground against larger incumbents. The basic structure is straightforward: charge the site owner based on dollars per kilowatt-hour delivered, with the rate tied to the functionality, service level, and support model required.
This approach better aligns incentives across the entire ecosystem.
For the property owner or charger operator, a UBF model reduces upfront risk. Owners are not forced to budget for recurring software costs before they understand how often the chargers will be used. This is especially important in multifamily housing, where owners may be required by code or encouraged by market expectations to install EV charging while still having limited visibility into near-term utilization. In many of these projects, EV adoption among residents will grow gradually.
As utilization rises, software providers participate in that growth. Higher use can ultimately generate more revenue than a flat SaaS model. More important, it gives software companies a direct incentive to improve reliability, user experience, charger visibility, payment functionality, and overall station performance. That is the alignment this market needs.
If the charger works, if the driver experience is good, and if utilization increases, everyone wins.
The traditional SaaS model often creates a weaker alignment. The software provider gets paid whether the charger is used or not. The site owner carries the cost whether utilization materializes or not. That imbalance is one of the reasons some stations become neglected, under-supported, or financially difficult to justify.
A usage-based model changes the conversation. It can reduce fixed operating costs for the charger owner, encourage the software provider to focus on uptime and customer experience, and give the site host better data to justify future expansion.
From a sales perspective, the value is obvious. If utilization data shows that existing stations are consistently occupied, the case for adding chargers becomes easier to prove. The payback model becomes clearer. The expansion conversation becomes data-driven. A property owner no longer has to guess whether more chargers are needed; the utilization history tells the story.
That is the kind of model investors should support as well. A usage-based structure still creates recurring revenue, but it does so in a way that is directly tied to market growth, asset performance, and customer value. It may be less convenient than a fixed prepaid contract, but it is far better aligned with long-term infrastructure deployment.
As an industry, we need to be honest about what slows projects down. It is not always permitting, utility delays, or hardware lead times. Sometimes, the obstacle is our own commercial structure.
If we want more chargers installed, more sites activated, and more drivers confident in public and private charging access, we need financial models that support adoption rather than penalize it. The industry should be focused on removing friction, improving reliability, and building networks that make economic sense for everyone involved.
That means rethinking prepaid software agreements. It means asking whether the recurring revenue model we inherited from the broader tech world is truly the right model for EV infrastructure.
It also means adopting pricing structures that give every party more skin in the gameThe EV charging market does not need more barriers. It needs more chargers in the ground, more reliable stations online, and more business models that support long-term utilization and growth. Usage-based software fees are not the only answer, but they are a much better fit for where this market is headed.
Robert Millard leads EV charging infrastructure strategy at Turtle and serves on the company’s board. Turtle is a fourth-generation electrical and industrial distributor with more than 100 years of experience moving critical infrastructure across the U.S. Turtle supports electrification projects across commercial, fleet, multifamily, and industrial sectors, from initial load analysis through project completion. Learn more at turtle.com/solutions/ev-charging
