The funnel you can’t see is the one losing you sessions
The driver you’ll never meet twice is 40 km from home, low on charge, parked at a unit they’ve never seen, in a hurry. They have ninety seconds of patience and a card in their pocket. What they do not have is the slightest interest in your brand.
Now put an app between them and the electron. Find it in the store. Wait out the download on a weak cell signal. Open it, accept the terms, create an account, verify an email or a phone, add a card, maybe clear a 3-D Secure challenge in a banking app they have to switch to and back from. Every one of those steps is a place to leak a user — and you’re asking a stranger to walk all of them for a single session they’ll never repeat.
That’s not an onboarding flow. It’s an abandonment funnel with a charger at the bottom.
Install friction is a conversion tax on strangers
There’s a clean way to think about access methods, and it isn’t about which one is most modern. It’s about who pays the friction, and how often.
A regular driver amortizes setup. They install once, register once, and every charge after that is frictionless — saved cards, history, favorites, loyalty. The cost is paid once and earned back over months. For them, an app is genuinely good.
The one-time driver amortizes nothing. They pay the full install-and-register cost for exactly one session, then never open the thing again. Every screen before the electron is pure tax. And here’s the cruel part: this is the driver most likely to bounce — the roaming visitor, the rental, the person passing through. The session you most need to just work is the one your app is most likely to lose.
QR doesn’t escape this. A static QR is spoofable and a dynamic one is better, but follow either far enough and you usually land in the same place: a web form or an app prompt asking the stranger to type a card into a phone, in a parking lot, card-not-present. You’ve swapped a store download for a mobile checkout — and moved the transaction into the more expensive, more fragile lane.
Plug & Charge is the elegant endgame: the cable authenticates the car, no phone at all. But it presupposes a provisioned vehicle and an eMSP contract behind it. A superb experience for the contracted regular — and not something a stranger in a rental can summon on the spot.
The method that asks the one-time driver for nothing is the one they already carry: a card.
What “no app” actually looks like
Here’s the whole flow, with nothing installed:
- Park and walk to the charger. No phone out yet.
- Key in an amount — say, a session worth roughly what a full top-up costs.
- Present a card. The terminal pre-authorizes that amount, card-present, the way a fuel pump or a hotel does.
- Start charging. A contactless tap means a phone wallet works too — Apple Pay and Google Pay ride the same EMV contactless rails as the plastic, so the driver who prefers their phone still taps and goes without installing anything of yours.
No download. No account. No password. No “verify your email.” The card the driver has carried for years is the credential, and the terminal is the interface.
This is the access path AFIR pushed operators toward: new high-power public points must accept contactless card payment — not because regulators love hardware, but because a card is the one credential every driver already has. The terminal isn’t a fallback for people who couldn’t be bothered to download the app. For the stranger, it’s the primary path.
There’s a quieter operator-side reason to want the card at the terminal, too. A card presented to a reader is a card-present transaction, with the economics that go with it; a card typed into a web form is card-not-present, which carries heavier markups and more fraud exposure — and those markups land hardest on the small, frequent AC sessions where there’s least margin to give away. The terminal also keeps raw card data inside dedicated hardware rather than your web stack, shrinking the surface you’d otherwise drag into PCI-DSS scope.
The path that’s easiest for the stranger happens to be the cleaner one for you.
The receipt and the status page arrive as a link
The objection to “no app” is usually: but then how does the driver track the session, and how do they get a receipt?
By link. By SMS. Nothing to install.
While charging, real-time status lives on a web page the driver reaches from a text — kW flowing, energy delivered, amount running against the hold. Concretely: the driver walks to the café across the lot, opens the link on the phone they already have, watches the kWh climb over a coffee, decides they’ve got enough, then either taps the button on the unit or just unplugs. The page reflects the stop, the hold settles to what was actually used, and they’re gone. No app was ever in the loop — just a browser tab they’ll close and forget.
When the session ends, the same channel delivers the thing that actually matters: a legal fiscal receipt, by link. Not a PDF someone emails the next day. A receipt the tax office accepts, generated through the country-specific fiscalization round trip and handed to the driver as a link they can open, save, or forward to whoever reimburses them.
That last part is where most “we’ll just email a receipt” approaches quietly fall apart. A compliant receipt isn’t a formatted document — it’s a tax-authority validation that has to travel from the invoicing provider to the unattended terminal and back, per country, before it’s valid. OCPI carries nothing for that round trip. Bolt bridges it both ways, so the link the driver opens is a receipt their tax authority recognizes, not a pretty summary. The driver sees a tidy page; underneath it, a fiscal handshake completed against whatever rules that country runs.
So the entire post-charge experience — progress, stopping, the legal receipt — happens over links the driver already knows how to use. A browser and a phone number. That’s the install footprint. Zero.
The app is a value-add, never a toll
None of this is an argument against apps. It’s an argument about who the app is for.
For the regular — the commuter, the fleet driver, the loyal customer — an account is a feature: saved payment, charge history, favorites, balance, loyalty. Let them opt in. Give them a reason to. That driver pays the setup cost gladly, because they earn it back every week.
The mistake is forcing that same cost onto the stranger as the price of admission. An app should be something a driver chooses because they’ll be back — not a tollbooth a one-time visitor has to clear to buy electricity once. Make the contactless card path the front door for everyone, and let the app be the upgrade for the people who keep coming through it.
That split only holds if the payment layer is door-agnostic — if the card-present session, the wallet tap, the live status link, and the fiscal receipt all run the same way whether the driver came through a terminal or an app. Get that right, and you can say yes to the stranger with a card and yes to the regular with an app, without welding either path to a specific charger model.
The driver passing through doesn’t need to know your brand, and they certainly don’t need to host it on their home screen. They need to plug in, tap a card, watch a link, and leave with a receipt the tax office will accept.
Give them that, and you win the session you were quietly losing in the app store.