Launch HN: AmpUp (YC W19) – A reservable electric car charging network
Hi HN,

This is Tom from ampUp (https://ampup.io/). We're building a
reservable electric car charging network out of shared private and
home chargers.

As a Nissan Leaf driver without a home charger, charging has been
almost a daily headache for me. For many commutes and trips I have to
ask myself, should I drive my Leaf, use Uber, take public transit,
walk really far, or just not go? This is due to the walk-in-only model
of the public charger, which results in unpredictable availability.
Worse, public charging is growing at a slower rate than EV adoption,
and the range estimators on EVs are no better than a 10-day weather
forecast.

I used the Plugshare app and it helped some, particularly the couch
surfing style of charging where I arrange a 2 hour slot with some home
charger hosts. When it worked well, it took out the unpredictability
and therefore anxiety. However, it doesn’t always work well. Many
times hosts won’t respond to text/calls to make the booking, and a
couple times I forgot to bring cash/check to pay for the electricity
as the host indicated.

My first attempt at this problem was building a webapp that worked as
an addon to Plugshare where hosts can create a calendar for their
charger, and set an hourly price where drivers can pay via credit
card. Once that’s set up, the host would paste the unique url to their
charger’s calendar in the description section of their Plugshare
listing. Long story short, this added as much inconvenience as
benefit, and drivers still ended up calling the host.

Given enough interests from hosts and based on experiences of a few
drivers including myself, I decided to make a second attempt and just
build a better app that focuses on the hosting and reservation flows.

After about 2 months of hustling and grinding, we
released ampUp (https://ampup.io/), where users can host multiple
chargers at flexible schedules and adjustable prices. Since the hosts
set up sharing calendar for their chargers, the other users can make
reservations with instantaneous confirmation. We use Stripe to enable
peer to peer payment with credit card rather than cash/check. We know
EV owners are willing to pay for charging and it’s important for hosts
to be able to make a meaningful amount if we want to scale this to
match our vision where one day there will always be a reservable
charger near where the user is or will be. From our analysis, with a
competitive (to public charger) pricing of $3/hr, hosts can expect to
make $190-$270/month in profit with just 3 rented hours per day.

For ampUp, our business model is to charge a flat 1 dollar to the
driver per reservation. If we use the $3/hr example from earlier, a 3
hour session will cost a total of $10 to add about 60 miles from a
residential level 2 charger. This "fuel" cost is on par with the most
fuel-efficient gas car which is the Mitsubishi Mirage. These numbers
are based on Bay Area electricity and gas costs.

ampUp already has thousands of hosts, but many of them are listings we
collected from all over the internet. The difference in the user
experience with those hosts is that we have to confirm the reservation
with them, as opposed to our own. This is a temporary limitation in
the "do things that don't scale" spirit. Our goal is to instantly confirm
reservations like Airbnb.

We sincerely invite the HN community’s feedback on our idea and on the
app and everything else in this space. You can reach me directly at
tom@ampup.io or for info@ampup.io. You can download the app at the top
of https://ampup.io/. We hope ampUp will help more people to drive
their electric vehicles as effortlessly as driving a gas car!