Advice on charger + rewards plans
Hi all,
I've done pretty extensive research on chargers and rewards plans, but I'm not closer to being able to make a decision!
My main thing is that I'd like to have a charger that I own and that will happily work without a rewards plan (as we know those won't last forever), which also means that the services that comes with it are good out of the box. If I was to for example select ChargeLabs, and ChargeLabs rewards go away, I want to be able to return to my OEM services / software / cloud infrastructure / etc. and happily keep going, and for those services to be good to high quality.
Finally, the experience and ease of use matters, this is where I stumble. If you look at the Google Play Store for some of the key apps like SWTCH or ChargeLabs, the reviews are abysmal. I was thinking SWTCH, as you do end up owning it, but the app experience looks pretty poor, even for a relatively dumb charger, I don't want to have to purchase an iphone just to get the SWTCH app working.
Some of the rewards only organisations seem like fairly fly-by-night things, with just one or two employees, hardly confidence inspiring. The Chargy reviews only talk about Kelly for example.
ChargePoint has a great sale on their Home Flex though I see conflicting messages on its OCPP support. Although ChargeLabs does claim they support it (presumably with direct API support instead of OCPP?). The ChargePoint Home Flex looks like a good product by itself, with a sizeable company and network behind it, so when the rewards disappear, I still have that. But ChargeLabs currently pays out in gift cards, though they claim cash rewards are coming soon.
SWTCH is primarily a commercial provider it appears, though I guess their rewards program is growing rapidly, but the charger is dumb (or at least the app?). The support experience appears questionable, at least according to Google Play reviews. The charger does support OCPP, so you can use other backends (any OCPP CSMS, or on-prem servers even).
Can anyone recommend a combo that might satisfy my requirements? Right now I keep defaulting back to SWTCH, and I can hope the experience will be ok ... thanks!