Three kinds of guest, three ways to charge
The business traveller, the weekend tourist and the corporate account do not want the same thing. On askacharge.com the same charger can serve all three at once:
- Pay as you go, no app. The guest scans the QR code on the charger and pays by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay in the browser. A hold is placed when the session starts and the exact amount is captured when it ends. The money lands in your Stripe account.
- Free as an amenity. Hand out an RFID card at reception — or register the guest's own — with a free tariff. Loyalty members, suites, staff: each group can have its own price, including zero.
- One invoice a month for companies. A corporate account gets its own cards and a monthly invoice by email, with every session listed.
Prices can be per kWh, per hour, per session or a mix, and they can change with the time of day (cheaper at night, for example), in your local time and currency.
What else a hotel uses
- Reservations. Hold a charger for a specific guest and time slot (OCPP ReserveNow), so the VIP arriving at 6 pm finds it free.
- Load sharing. Set the maximum power for the car park and the platform shares it among the cars that are charging, so you don't have to upgrade the hotel's electrical service for four more chargers.
- Your brand. The payment page and the driver portal carry the hotel's logo and colours, on your own domain if you want.
- Alerts. An email when a charger goes offline (not when it reconnects five seconds later), so the front desk isn't the first to hear about it from a guest.
- Remote start and stop from the dashboard, for the guest who can't get it to work at midnight.
What it costs
- Software: $20/month (€20 in Europe) for the whole site, with unlimited chargers. No per-port fee, no setup fee, no contract. 30-day free trial, no card.
- Card payments from drivers: 2% + $0.25 per payment, with Stripe's own fee already inside that figure. The money goes to your own Stripe account.
- The software takes 0% of the energy you sell.
You can set it up yourself — sign up, add the chargers, change one setting on each charger — or we do it with you on a call, with you or your installer. Full price list.
Which chargers
Any charger that speaks OCPP 1.6J or 2.0.1, from any brand: you point it at askacharge.com by changing its server address, and you can point it somewhere else the day you want to leave. If you haven't bought the chargers yet, ask the seller in writing whether the owner can edit the OCPP server URL — some brands lock it to their own cloud. How to change it, brand by brand.
What we don't do (yet)
- Support is by email from Spain, six to nine hours ahead of the US. No call centre and no 24/7 phone line for drivers. Drivers pay without an account, so most of them never need one.
- No native driver app. Drivers use a web page (they can install it on the phone); the QR code needs no app at all.
- No idle fee for a car left plugged in after it finishes charging.
- No US tax filing. You set your tax label and rate, and invoices carry them; filing is yours.
- No property management system integration: a session can't be charged to the room automatically.
Chargers already installed but out of service?
If a charger has been stopped for a month or more because the platform that ran it shut down, stopped supporting it or the contract ended, the rescue is free: 3 months without paying and the set-up on us, over a call with you or your installer. Write to info@askacharge.com with the make, the model and where it is. Rescue terms.
Sources
- Prices: askacharge.com pricing
- Other types of business: askacharge.com by sector
- Choosing a platform: the best EV charging management software in 2026