Twelve differences.
Three of them ours to fix.
We have not named anybody. We cannot check another company's feature list this week, and a table telling you what a rival does not do is worth exactly what it costs to write. What follows is what we do, next to the pattern across platforms in this market — and then the three things you would find out about us within a day anyway.
| What | AthenireCharge | Typically |
|---|---|---|
| Published pricing | 10% of what you earn, on a public page, with a calculator | Quoted on a call, after a form |
| Hardware lock-in | Any OCPP 1.6-J or 2.0.1 charger. We sell none, so we steer you to none | Platform bundled with the vendor's own hardware |
| When a charge delivers nothing | Refunded automatically, without the driver noticing or asking | Raise a ticket, wait, follow up |
| Whether a charger actually works | A reliability score from real sessions, shown on the listing. Neither the operator nor we can switch it off | A status field the charger reports about itself |
| Coverage beyond our own network | Public chargers merged onto the same map, marked as unbookable rather than dressed up | Only the network's own sites, so the map is empty elsewhere |
| Roaming | Both sides of OCPI 2.2.1 — we accept partner drivers and send ours out | CPO side only, or a bilateral integration per partner |
| Open network protocols | Beckn / UEI, both BAP and BPP, so a charge is discoverable from any UEI app | Discovery stays inside each operator's own app |
| GST | Receipt vouchers on advances, refund vouchers on returns, GSTR-1 Table 11A from the vouchers as issued | A monthly CSV to hand your accountant |
| What a remote command tells you | Queued, accepted or refused — with the charger's own reason for refusing | Success or failure |
| Statements you can reconcile | A period closes once; the rate is written onto the statement, so a pricing change never restates a closed month | A dashboard figure that moves |
| White-label | Your name, logo and colour. Status colours stay network-wide on purpose | Available as a paid tier, or not at all |
| A second revenue line | Screens on your chargers earn a share of every advert, settled on the same payout | Screens, where they exist, are the site owner's own deal with an agency |
“Typically” describes the pattern across Indian charging platforms as they publish it — which is checkable by anybody, because most of them publish very little. Every claim in the middle column is tied to the part of our codebase that makes it true.
Where we are behind
Said here rather than discovered later, because you would find all three within a day and think less of us for the omission.
Our own network is small
Nineteen stations. If you need a dense network today rather than a platform to run yours on, we are not it yet — and the map fills the gap with public chargers we cannot book for you.
The app is not in the stores yet
It is built and it works; it has not shipped. Anything a competitor can show you on a phone today, they can and we cannot.
We publish no uptime figures
Because we have barely any traffic to measure. Publishing a percentage computed from a handful of sessions would be a worse kind of dishonest than saying this.
If a dense network today is what you need, take one of the big ones. If what you need is a platform to run your own chargers on, that is the thing we have actually built.
See what it costs