Owning and operating every charger yourself is the slowest way to grow a charging network, because every new site costs you capital, a lease negotiation and an operations headcount. The alternative is to let other people put up some of that - a franchisee who buys and runs the hardware, a dealer group that wants chargers at its showrooms, a property company that would rather operate than just host - while you supply the platform, the brand standard and the commercial terms. The question that decides whether this works is unglamorous: can one platform run several operators without turning your business into a spreadsheet reconciliation exercise?
Four commercial models, in order of how much someone else carries
| Model | Who owns the hardware | Who faces the driver | What you supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own and operate | You | You | Everything - capital, operations, brand, platform |
| Site-host revenue share | You | You | Everything except the land; the host takes a share of revenue |
| Franchise / partner operator | The partner | Your brand | Platform, brand, pricing standards, support model; the partner funds and runs sites |
| White-label reseller | The reseller or their customers | The reseller's own brand | The platform underneath, invisible to the end driver |
These are not stages of maturity - plenty of networks run all four simultaneously, and that combination is precisely what makes the platform requirement non-trivial. A single business can be the operator in one city, the franchisor in three others, and a quiet software supplier to a competitor's network, with the same chargers and the same driver app in the middle of it.
What changes when a second operator joins
Up to the moment a partner comes on board, everything in the platform belongs to one organization. After it, four things need to separate cleanly, and they are the four most common places a partner model breaks:
- Visibility. A partner sees their own stations, sessions, customers and revenue - and nothing of any other partner's. This has to be enforced by the architecture rather than by role assignment discipline, which is the practical difference between genuine multi-tenancy and a single-tenant system with careful permissions. It is the distinction covered in what a multi-tenant CSMS actually is.
- Pricing authority. Who sets the tariff at a franchised station? A workable answer is usually a floor-and-ceiling arrangement - the franchisor defines the band and the partner prices inside it - which requires tariffs that can be assigned per station and per charger rather than set once for the whole network.
- Money flow. Revenue arrives through one payment stack and then has to split: the partner's share, your platform or franchise fee, the site host's cut underneath the partner. Every split needs a record that both sides can inspect.
- Operational responsibility. When a charger at a franchised site faults at 10pm, whose alert is it? Define this in the contract and configure it in the platform so the alert routes to whoever is actually contracted to respond - otherwise both parties assume the other is handling it.
Settlement is where partner models are won or lost
The commercial logic of a partner network is easy to agree in a term sheet and tedious to execute monthly. Each period you have to compute what each partner earned, net the platform or franchise fee, account for refunds and chargebacks that happened after the session, handle any site-host share sitting underneath the partner, and produce a statement the partner will accept without a phone call. Done manually, this is the work that quietly caps how many partners a network can carry - and it is the reason some operators stop signing partners at a dozen without ever identifying why.
The platform requirement is that payout calculations, revenue reporting and settlement records come from the same session data the driver was charged against, so a partner's statement and your ledger cannot disagree. Partner reconciliation as a first-class function - rather than an export into a spreadsheet - is what makes the twentieth partner cost the same to administer as the second. The mechanics are the same ones described in revenue reconciliation and settlement.
One brand or many?
Franchise and reseller models pull in opposite directions on branding, and the platform has to support both answers.
A franchise normally wants one driver-facing brand: the customer should not know or care which partner owns the hardware at a given site, and the value of the network comes from the brand meaning the same thing everywhere. That means one app, one tariff structure within agreed bands, one support experience, and one set of standards you can actually enforce - which, in practice, means your partner configures their operation inside limits you set rather than building their own.
A reseller wants the opposite: their own brand, their own app listing, their own customer relationship, with your platform deliberately invisible. If that is a market you intend to serve, the platform has to be able to present an entirely separate branded experience per tenant rather than a shared app with an operator picker inside it. The difference matters to end customers more than it sounds - see white-label vs. single-brand CSMS.
Partner networks and roaming are different things
A partner operates under your commercial model, on your platform, usually under your brand standards. Roaming connects you to a network you have no commercial control over at all, so that each side's drivers can charge on the other's hardware. They solve different problems and are often confused in early strategy discussions: roaming extends where your drivers can charge, a partner model extends who builds and runs your network. Most growing operators eventually want both, but conflating them leads to signing a roaming agreement when what the business actually needed was a franchise structure. For the roaming side, see OCPI and EV roaming.
Before you sign the first partner
- Decide what the partner cannot change. Brand presentation, tariff bands, minimum uptime standards and support response times are easier to agree before the first contract than to retrofit across ten.
- Agree the data rights explicitly. Who owns the driver relationship, who can market to those customers, and what happens to the session history if the partnership ends.
- Define the exit. Partnerships end. Agree in advance how stations and customer accounts transfer, and confirm the platform can actually move a site between tenants without re-registering the hardware.
- Test tenant isolation during evaluation. Ask to see what a partner operator's login shows, not a description of it.
- Check the economics at scale. A platform priced per connector behaves very differently across a 40-partner network than across one - worth modelling against your actual growth plan, alongside the connector-level revenue case.
CarChargeOS is built as a multi-tenant platform with operator management, per-station and per-charger tariff assignment, revenue share and payout calculations, and partner reconciliation as standard capabilities - see the platform page, or the enterprise scope on the enterprise page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a site host and a partner operator?
A site host supplies the location and takes a share of the revenue; you still own the hardware, the customer and the operation. A partner operator funds and runs the sites themselves and keeps a much larger share, while you supply the platform and the brand. The host model is covered in detail in site-host revenue economics.
Can one partner use their own payment provider?
Sometimes, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than by default. A shared payment stack keeps settlement simple and gives drivers one consistent payment experience; a partner-specific provider may be unavoidable where a partner operates in a different market with different local payment methods. The trade-off is reconciliation complexity, so it should be a market-driven exception rather than a standard offer.
Do franchise partners need their own app?
Usually no - the point of a franchise is one driver-facing brand, and a separate app per partner fragments exactly the thing the franchise exists to build. Partners typically need an operator login scoped to their own sites, not a consumer app of their own. A separate branded app belongs to the reseller model, where the end customer is deliberately not yours.