Stellos Playbook · EV Charging

EV Charging at Work: Free, Paid, or Reimbursed?

Let me tell you more about a small question that turns out to be surprisingly loaded, the question of whether drivers should pay to charge at your building. To show you how the good answers look, let me start with a little story about a meeting.

Stellos operates parking technology across Switzerland and Germany, trusted by teams at Google, Swisscom, Implenia, Wincasa, CWS and Sony.

The meeting that ran long

A property team set aside fifteen minutes to decide how to bill for the new chargers. They were still talking an hour later. Free felt generous but looked expensive once the first electricity bill arrived. Charging felt fair but risked turning a tenant perk into a tenant grievance. And someone kept asking the question underneath all of it: are we trying to make money from charging, or trying to keep tenants happy? The answer to that decides everything else.

So let me walk you through the three models the way that room finally did.

Free, paid, and reimbursed

Free is the simplest and the easiest to love, until the energy bill and the demand charges land entirely on the owner, and until the charger that is free is also the charger nobody ever vacates. Paid, a price per kWh or per session, changes behaviour the moment it exists: low-value top-ups fall away, spots free up for drivers who need them, and the energy cost stops landing only on you. Reimbursed is the model that fits employers best, the driver charges and the company settles the cost centrally, which keeps the perk while putting a number on it. The right choice follows that one question from the meeting: perk, or revenue.

Tenants and visitors are different questions

Here is a distinction that quietly resolves a lot of the argument: tenants and visitors do not want the same thing. Tenant and employee charging rewards a simple, predictable arrangement, flat, reimbursed, or a modest per-kWh rate. Visitor charging is closer to ordinary paid parking, where a session price, or dynamic pricing at the busy hours, both prices the scarcity and earns its keep. You can run different rules for the two groups on the same hardware, as long as you can tell them apart.

None of it works without clean access and metering

And that is the catch under every model: you can only bill what you can measure and attribute. Per-driver billing, tenant-versus-visitor rules, reimbursement reports, none of it exists without reliable access control to identify who plugged in (ANPR vs cards vs mobile) and metering behind each point. Treat charging the way you would the rest of employee parking and mobility benefits, and remember the tax treatment of a charging benefit varies by country, so check it locally before you roll out. This is one decision inside parking and EV charging strategy.