What actually breaks
A connected charger is not a self-contained appliance. It holds a permanent connection to a central server — the CSMS — and that server is what decides whether a user is authorized, starts and stops sessions, records the kWh and triggers payment. When the server goes dark, the charger loses its brain.
Depending on how it was configured, one of two things happens: it becomes completely inoperative, or it falls back to a degraded mode where it charges anyone who plugs in, authorizing nobody and billing nobody. The second is worse than it sounds if your charger sits in a public parking lot.
The question that decides everything: can you change the URL?
OCPP is the standard protocol chargers and servers use to understand each
other. If your unit genuinely implements it, somewhere in its configuration
there is a field holding an address like wss://…. That field is
the whole story:
- If you can edit it, your charger belongs to nobody but you. Point that URL at another CSMS, the unit connects, and it works again. No hardware swap, no firmware change, nobody's permission required.
- If it's missing or locked, the vendor burned its own cloud into the firmware. There is nothing to be done without opening up the unit, and in many cases the only way out is replacing the communications board.
This is the real reason to be skeptical of an "OCPP compatible" label on a brochure. Compatible can mean the vendor speaks OCPP to its own cloud, with that setting kept out of your reach. The test isn't what the catalog claims: it's whether you, from the unit's own admin screen, can type in a different address.
How to check before you buy
- Ask for the configuration manual, not the sales brochure, and find the OCPP settings section. If the manual doesn't document it, that's a bad sign.
- Check the Open Charge Alliance's list of certified equipment. A model appearing there means it has passed independent testing, not merely that the vendor says so.
- Ask explicitly, in writing: "can I configure the OCPP server URL and credentials from the unit's own interface, without vendor involvement?" That answer, in an email, is worth more than any certificate.
- Confirm the unit supports OCPP 1.6J or 2.0.1. Anything older than 1.6 running over SOAP is effectively dead.
What you get back, and what you lose, when you migrate
It's worth being realistic about the scope of the job. Moving a charger from one CSMS to another:
- You get back full operational control: authorization, remote start and stop, meter readings, payment and invoicing.
- You leave behind the session history living on the old platform, unless you export it before the lights go out. If your provider has announced a shutdown and you still have access, export today.
- You have to redo RFID cards and user accounts. The physical cards themselves still work: their identifiers need re-registering in the new system, so there's no need to buy new cards.
Migrating to askacharge.com
You register the charger in the dashboard, copy the OCPP URL the platform gives you, paste it into the unit's configuration and wait for it to reconnect. From that point it shows up online with its live status. We support OCPP 1.6J and 2.0.1 natively, so old and new equipment coexist in the same account.
And the same logic that lets you in lets you out: the URL is a standard OCPP endpoint. The day you want to move to another platform, you change that one line and your charger goes with you. It's the only guarantee worth anything — the one that doesn't depend on us still being here.
The lesson for anyone selling installations
If you're an installer, this has become a selling point in its own right. Your customer has read the headlines about chargers that lost their service and is rightly nervous about sinking several thousand dollars into equipment whose working life depends on a foreign company not changing strategy.
Being able to tell them that the hardware you install is standard, that the software running it is interchangeable, and that in the worst case you change one address and everything keeps working, is exactly the reassurance that whoever is selling them a closed ecosystem cannot offer.
If your charger is an EVBox Elvi or BusinessLine that Everon used to manage (closed on 1 December 2025), the way out is in the EVBox guide: the EVBox Connect app in installer mode still lets you change the backend.