🔗 Your charging subscription doesn’t make loyal customers. It makes them your hostages with a discount trying to escape whenever possible.
💥 From my own community, in a podcast discussion with Sebastian Henßler, and across LinkedIn or in the posts of Felix Hamer: People feel forced not only towards apps but into subscriptions they didn’t want. And they are mostly right about the feeling, even when they are wrong about the mechanics.
💰Charging infrastructure has massive fixed costs. These costs exist whether anyone charges or not. The subscription tries to distribute that risk across a user base instead onto every single session. So far, so rational. Just a planning instrument, right?
🧠 No! Because it breaks in the execution. For a customer it’s simple: without subscription I’m being overcharged so I have to pay to avoid it. The real price sits behind a paywall. Whether that’s objectively true does matter as much as a short one-month notice period or just low fee. So not at all! Perception drives behaviour and every charging session is a vote with the cable.
🧊 But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A charging point operator subscription gives you price stability on a fraction of the network. Want decent coverage? Get three to five subs from different providers. That’s the streaming problem applied to charging. Fragmented, expensive in total, and the customer ends up managing a portfolio instead of just charging.
An mobility service provider subscription solves coverage. One account, hundreds of thousands of chargers. But it doesn’t solve reasonable pricing. Prices fluctuate, sometimes you don’t see them before the session, and what not. You get the network but you lose the predictability and the reasonable pricing.
The result is subscription fatigue, same pattern as app fatigue, same cause: designed from the provider’s perspective and far from being customer centric.
🎭 What both models share is a gap between the value delivered and the price charged. The added value doesn’t match what’s asked for, even if providers believe it does. Willingness to pay isn’t there because the customer doesn’t feel the delight. The only exception are price-insensitive fleet card users who never check the bill themselves.
And the customer doesn’t care about your CAPEX, your roaming agreements or your margin structure. Those are your problems. The moment you make them the customer’s problem, you lose their trust.
If customers subscribe because they feel they gained a benefit, you’ve built something valuable, a loyalty program.
If they subscribe because they feel they have to avoid something, you’ve built a trap, a penalty-engagement-system.
Penalty doesn’t scale. Loyalty does. Your move!
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