EV Charging Software in the UK

About EV Charging Software

We build and operate EV charging software, not just write it. buildbyravirai runs PlugEV, a production OCPP 1.6-J charge point management system (CSMS) live on 40+ chargers across two Indian cities since early 2025. We build the full stack an EV charging operator needs: the OCPP gateway that talks to the hardware, RFID and UPI billing with automatic GST invoices, the operator dashboard, and the driver-facing app.

What the engagement includes

• OCPP 1.6-J and 2.0.1 CSMS development
• Charge point management dashboard
• RFID authentication with offline fallback
• UPI and card billing (Razorpay) with automatic GST invoices
• Per-session, time-based, and per-kWh tariff engines
• Driver mobile app and web charging flow
• Load management and smart charging
• OCPI roaming integration

Where UK charge point regulation lands in a CSMS

The first question on a UK charging build is not which protocol version you want but whether the sites are open to the public, because two different instruments sit either side of that line and they ask for different things. Charge points available to the public fall under the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023. Private units, domestic and workplace, are caught instead by the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021, which apply in Great Britain and which put their requirements inside the charging logic rather than around it: a charge point in scope has default charging hours it will not charge outside of unless somebody changes the setting, and it applies a randomised delay at the start of a session so a street of units does not all pull at once the moment a cheap tariff window opens, with the person charging able to cancel that delay for an individual charge. Two things about that regime catch buyers out. Those duties attach to the sale and installation of the unit rather than to your backend, so a depot rollout can be squarely in scope while the operator software project around it looks untouched, and the definition carves out units above a power threshold as well as public ones, so the fastest chargers on a private site may sit outside it while the slower ones do not. Both are worth confirming against the regulations with your own counsel rather than taking from us. What it changes in the build is that the compliant default lives in the unit while the hours you actually want come down as charging profiles from the central system, so the behaviour is split across two systems and has to be tested as one, and the same regulations expect the unit to keep its smart functionality when the owner changes electricity supplier, which is a configuration and tariff question and not one the protocol answers. It wants settling in week one, because it decides what the tariff engine and the session state machine are for.

On the public side the duties land almost entirely in software. The price a driver is quoted before plugging in is a figure in pence per kilowatt hour, which pushes rating towards energy rather than time or session, and it makes the meter the invoice: MeterValues stops being a monitoring nicety and becomes the number a customer can dispute. That is worth checking per charger brand before a tariff model is signed off, because the per-vendor layer in the platform we run exists precisely because real units report the specification loosely, and a charger that reports its register in the wrong unit or resets it mid-session produces a bill nobody can defend. Contactless is the second duty, with thresholds set by power rating and by date rather than by site, and the awkward part is that it has to reconcile with the first: the amount authorised on the card is unknown before the session, the amount captured is the energy actually delivered, and both have to come back to the same pence per kilowatt hour the driver was shown, on your acquirer's clock rather than while the driver is still watching a screen. The free round the clock helpline reads like a staffing obligation and is mostly a software one. The person calling is standing in front of a charger reading out what is printed on it, so the console needs remote start and stop, reset, unlock connector and that unit's recent messages in one view, found by the printed reference rather than by a database id. If the helpline is contracted out, that is a scoped role with an audit trail rather than a shared administrator login, and it is cheaper to design in than to carve out later.

Reliability and open data are the two that cannot be retrofitted, because each is a claim about a year that has already happened. A rapid network has to average ninety-nine per cent reliability across the year and report it, and a report is not a dashboard. It needs every availability transition stored with a reason and downtime attributed to a cause, so that an outage genuinely outside your control can be told apart from a firmware fault or a backend deploy that took the fleet offline for twenty minutes. None of that can be reconstructed from a system that only ever showed the current status, which is why the availability log goes in as an evidence trail from the first charger rather than as reporting added in the quarter the return falls due. Open data pulls the same way from the other end: availability has to be published in an open, machine-readable form and kept current, so the feed is a first-class output of the OCPP gateway rather than a nightly export, and the same status message that drives your own map is the one a third party reads. Roaming completes it. On Indian networks we have been able to leave OCPI until the core platform is stable, and on a UK public network that ordering is harder to defend: roaming means authorising a token your system never issued, against a partner rather than your own whitelist, and pushing charge detail records out on somebody else's schema, which is a different settlement model rather than an export bolted on at the end. Which thresholds, dates and exemptions catch your own network is for your counsel to confirm against the regulations before the first site is energised, because the obligations attach to charge points that will already be in the ground by the time anyone asks.

How we work with UK clients

UK engagements tend to start with procurement questions rather than technical ones. Who holds the data, which law governs the contract, whether you can produce a record of processing if the ICO asks. We answer those in the proposal instead of leaving them to a legal review three weeks in, because that review is where UK projects usually stall.

Invoicing is the other thing worth settling early. We are outside the UK, so services we supply generally fall under the reverse charge and your finance team accounts for the VAT rather than paying it to us. Our invoices say so explicitly. We quote in pounds, the figure does not move with the exchange rate mid-project, and payment by bank transfer avoids the card fees that make a five-figure invoice unnecessarily expensive.

Indicative pricing in GBP

Converted from our published Indian rates and rounded. Exchange rates move, so the figure on your quote is calculated on the day it is issued.

Questions UK clients ask

EV Charging Software: common questions

Other markets we work in