October 29, 2026

EV Charging. Just 12 Cents.

Four years ago, when we started building EVnSteven, I made a bet on the future of software. I’d been watching artificial intelligence develop for 30 years, and I knew it was only a matter of time before AI reduced the cost of software development by orders of magnitude. So we did something unusual. We priced our software for a future that hadn’t arrived yet. Just 12 cents per charging session.

Okay, I owe you a small apology for the clickbait title. The electricity isn’t 12 cents. That’s our software fee for tracking an entire charging session, regardless of how much electricity you use. But the story behind that tiny price is much more interesting than the title suggests.

Today, that future is arriving faster than I imagined. I’ve recently built several software projects entirely on my own using Claude Code. Each took just three or four days. Without AI, those same projects would have taken me months of manual programming. That’s not a small improvement in productivity. That’s a fundamental change in the economics of software development. And we’re only getting started.

A low price doesn’t mean low quality. It doesn’t mean the software is inferior, less sophisticated, or less prestigious than an expensive alternative. It means the cost of producing excellent software is falling dramatically, and we believe customers should benefit. Too many software companies are still pricing their products according to yesterday’s development costs. We decided to price ours for tomorrow.

And here’s where the economics get interesting. At 50,000 daily active users, if each completed one paid charging session per day, EVnSteven would generate $6,000 daily, or approximately $2.19 million annually in gross revenue. This illustrates the power of small fees at scale. We don’t manufacture hardware, install charging stations, or process electricity payments. Our overhead is relatively small, and AI is making software development and maintenance increasingly efficient. We don’t need to charge a lot to build a successful business. We just need to deliver something valuable enough that people want to use it.

Meanwhile, much of the EV charging industry continues piling on hardware costs, software subscriptions, transaction fees, network charges, and sometimes even a share of carbon credits. We’ve taken a different approach: use the outlets you already have, let residents record their own charging sessions, and trust them to pay their fair share. One of the greatest joys of building EVnSteven is watching people discover that they can trust their neighbors. Four years ago, we made two bets: that AI would make great software dramatically cheaper, and that people could be trusted to do the right thing. We’re building a business around both convictions, and perhaps one day we’ll even open-source the entire project. Because the future shouldn’t be about finding more ways to charge people. It should be about eliminating the things they never needed to pay for in the first place.

David Williston
Founder, EVnSteven.app