u/kryptic85

Since Tesla opened Supercharger for Business, a property owner can buy and own a Supercharger site — Tesla's configurator quotes the hardware and sketches revenue. I spent months modeling the side the configurator doesn't show, using the filed utility tariff for each territory (86 schedules across 49 states + DC so far). Some things I learned that I haven't seen written up anywhere:

1. The utility territory matters more than the state. The same 8-stall site with the same traffic can differ by six figures a year in electricity cost depending on which side of a utility boundary the parcel sits. The spread in filed demand charges alone runs from about $3/kW-month (Kansas) to $34/kW-month (Casper, WY) — roughly $1,500/mo vs $17,000/mo for the same 500 kW site before a single kWh is sold.

2. Demand charges come in four different structures, not one. Subscription blocks (PG&E's BEV-2 style), plain per-kW, load-factor tiers (the Massachusetts EV rates), and capped-kW designs (Florida's GSLD-1EV). Two territories with similar headline rates can bill completely differently at Supercharger load shapes — DCFC sites have brutal peak-to-average ratios, which is exactly what demand charges punish.

3. The meter bills more kWh than cars receive. Conversion and cabling losses mean a site that dispenses 1M kWh/yr purchases roughly 1.14M at a typical 12% loss factor. Revenue rides the small number, electricity cost rides the big one — about $29k/yr of invisible cost at California-ish rates.

4. Some states tax every kWh sold on top of the power bill. Pennsylvania 1.72 cents/kWh, Georgia 2.8 cents, a 3-cent cluster (OK/MT/WI/NE). Utah taxes gross charging revenue — works out to about 5 cents/kWh at typical retail. None of this appears on a utility bill.

5. Rough scale, at defaults: an 8-stall V4 build lands around $1.26M all-in (hardware + install + contingency + sales tax, before any utility upgrade), and a decently-ramped site grosses roughly $300k/yr at $0.45/kWh — against which the utility bill, Tesla's $0.10/kWh network fee, rent, and the tax stack all bite. Whether what's left clears cost of capital is genuinely site-by-site — I've modeled territories where it pencils comfortably and neighboring ones where it never does.

Disclosure: I built the tool I used for this — ForgeAsset (https://forgeasset.com). The interactive map (every US Supercharger over territory-level effective cost) and the demand-charge lookup are free, no signup. The full site model is paid; that's how I fund the tariff research. Happy to answer questions about any specific territory or utility in the comments, and if you spot a filed rate I've got wrong, I genuinely want to know — the whole point is matching the filed sheets.

been building this solo for about a year. cross posts to X, linkedin, bluesky, mastodon, threads, pinterest, tiktok and the AI writes drafts in your own voice.

last week i finally queried my own database instead of guessing. 51 signups in 90 days, 2 connected an account, ZERO ever scheduled a post !!

took me a while to figure out why. to try anything you had to give OAuth write access to your real X account, to a product you just met 60 seconds ago. my chrome extension which asks for nothing has 93 users and one guy used it 2720 times. same product, same me. only difference was what i asked for before giving anything ..

so i rebuilt the first screen. you can now write a post, let AI draft one, and preview how it looks on each network before connecting anything at all. connect is now the step you take when you want to publish something you already like.

free to try, no card. would really like feedback on whether the first screen earns the connect now, or if it still feels like a wall

https://xposterai.com

happy to answer anything on the stack (flask, vanilla MV3 extension, no build step) or the OAuth plumbing for 7 networks which was the least fun part 😅