Deal with increased costs for Chargeprice API

[johan12345]

For a couple years now, we have been using the Chargeprice.app API for our price comparison feature in Europe. Being a non-commercial open source project and also having contributed to Chargeprice's open source web frontend, the price I paid for this API was significantly reduced compared to commercial customers. Unfortunately, this is going to change now - due to the increased effort for maintaining the data, the monthly price will be doubled now and potentially increase further in the future.

The current volume of donations is about the same as the new price of the API, so basically all donations would now be going to Chargeprice. This is not viable in the long term, especially if prices will further increase.

With the next update, I am going to slightly increase the frequency of dialogs asking for donations and see how things evolve over the next few months. If this doesn't help, I will have to remove the native integration of Chargeprice. In that case, I could revert back to linking to their own website or app.

A long-term solution could be to run our own source for pricing data under an open license. This could be either filled from community contributions or scraped from the providers' APIs (where reasonably possible). But I don't think I have enough time to be the one who builds and maintains this alone.

GoingElectric.de do also have a database of payment providers (https://www.goingelectric.de/stromtankstellen/anbieter/), but it is not accessible through their public API and therefore not permitted to use for third-party apps according to their API terms of service. The data are also in a less useful format, as the prices are filled in using free-text fields.

Status 11/2024: After the doubling of the monthly cost in Jan 2024 there have not yet been further price increases from Chargeprice so far, and the donation volume has increased quite a bit, so the costs are still bearable. But if API costs increase further in the future, I will have to remove the native Chargeprice integration.

[agdejager]

i just did a donation. :-)

[mhantsch]

Maybe make a "premium" (paid subscription) version of EVMap with access to Chargeprice data?

[johan12345]

Hmm, yeah. It is a possibility, though it would be at least slightly against the open-source spirit of the app... And it would require me to maintain two separate payment and validation systems for Google Play and F-Droid (or, the F-Droid version would lose access to Chargeprice).

The pricing of the Chargeprice data also (at least currently) does not depend on the number of users - so to find a sensible price for a subscription I would have to guess how many users would want to pay for it.