I plugged my plug-in hybrid into a ChargePoint station in the Alexion garage at 100 College Street in New Haven. Not a Tesla, not a 100 kWh battery on wheels. A plug-in hybrid, the car equivalent of a phone you top off on the way out the door. And when I looked at my account and my card afterward, I found two things the ChargePoint app never bothered to mention: a 25-cent fee, and a $50 pending charge sitting on my credit card.
To be clear up front: the $50 isn’t money ChargePoint kept. It’s a pre-authorization hold, the thing gas pumps and hotels do to make sure your card works. It drops off. But it’s $50, it used to be $25 for me, and nothing in the app told me it was coming or why it doubled. That’s the real story here. Not the money. The silence.
The 25 cents
What looks like the explanation for the quarter is ChargePoint’s own “Service Fee.” Starting in March 2026, ChargePoint began adding a per-session fee on paid sessions, on top of whatever the station owner charges. Per ChargePoint’s FAQ, it’s $0.25 for AC charging and $0.49 for DC if you have a ChargePoint account, and $0.49 / $0.99 if you’re a guest paying with a card. (chargepoint) Free sessions and zero-energy sessions are exempt.
A quarter is a quarter. I’m not starting a GoFundMe. But think about who it hits hardest. On a big EV, 25 cents disappears into a $20 session. On a plug-in hybrid, where a full charge might not cost much more than a fancy coffee, a flat per-session fee is a much bigger slice of the bill. Plug in for a short top-off and the fee can be a real percentage of what you paid for actual electricity.
Did ChargePoint announce it? Apparently, yes. There was an email to drivers, and my hometown of Guilford, just down the road, even posted a notice that ChargePoint, not the town, would be collecting the new fee at the town’s chargers. (guilford) Maybe that email is sitting in my promotions folder next to 400 offers for gutter guards. But an email in February is not the same as telling me at the moment I’m paying.
The $50 that used to be $25
Here’s the part that actually got my attention. A pending $50 charge from ChargePoint. ChargePoint’s FAQ explains that a pre-authorization is “a temporary hold placed on your payment method before a charging session begins” to confirm the card works, and that it’s “not a permanent charge.” (chargepoint) Fine. Normal. Gas stations do it.
But $50? For a plug-in hybrid? At typical public Level 2 prices, it’s hard to picture a plug-in hybrid session costing anywhere near $50. And the holds I’d seen from ChargePoint before were $25. Nothing in the app said “heads up, the hold on this session is now $50.” I found out by looking at my card.
So I went looking for the actual policy. ChargePoint publishes it, sort of, spread across a couple of FAQ pages:
- Sessions started with a ChargePoint account: $25 hold for AC, $50 for DC. (chargepoint)
- Sessions started without a ChargePoint account: a $50 hold. (chargepoint)
- Releasing the hold can take up to seven business days, depending on your bank. (chargepoint)
Those account amounts don’t seem to be new, either. An archived copy of the FAQ from January 2026 shows the same $25 AC / $50 DC numbers. (wayback machine) So, as far as I can tell, ChargePoint didn’t quietly raise the published hold. Which makes the jump more confusing, not less.
So why did mine double?
I don’t know, and ChargePoint didn’t tell me. These are my best guesses from reading ChargePoint’s own rules, and they’re guesses:
- The session didn’t count as an “account” session. ChargePoint’s guest rules apply when you pay “through other means,” like a card at the station. If the session got started or authorized some way the system treated as not-my-account, the published hold is $50 instead of $25.
- The charger was treated as DC. The account hold is $50 for DC sessions. This is a Level 2 (AC) charger, so it shouldn’t apply, but if the system somehow classified the session as DC, $50 is the published number.
- Something changed on the payment side. ChargePoint says its “payment processors may place” the hold. That wording leaves room for the hold to vary by processor, payment method, or wallet. Other drivers online have described seeing a different hold than the one the station showed, so I don’t think I’m the only one confused. That part is anecdotal.
Any of those could be totally legitimate. That’s not my complaint. My complaint is that I had to become a part-time ChargePoint FAQ archaeologist to figure out which one it might be.
Then came the $7 parking fee
And then, just to make sure I was paying attention, ChargePoint topped it off. On a more recent session at the same garage I never got the notification that my car was almost full. What I got instead was an email, not a push, warning me that I’d be charged if I didn’t move my car. That email showed up about an hour after the charging had already finished. By then the meter was running. I ended up paying over $7 in parking fees for about $3 worth of electricity.
Read that again. The parking penalty cost more than twice as much as the thing I came for. And the only warning arrived by the slowest channel available, an hour too late to matter.
You might say, just set a timer. I’d love to. But this is a shared Level 2 charger, so the power gets split when two cars are plugged in. If I’m alone, it charges one speed. If someone pulls in next to me, it slows down. There’s no way to predict when the car will be done, which is exactly why I need the notification to work.
And no, my car can’t cover for ChargePoint. My Jeep sends charging alerts through SiriusXM, which means a separate monthly subscription, and even then the signal doesn’t do well on the second floor of a nine-story parking garage. So the ChargePoint app is the one thing that should be telling me my car is full. It didn’t.
Could I fight the $7? Sure. In my experience, getting a human on the phone at ChargePoint takes 20 minutes or more. I’m not spending half an hour of my life to win back seven dollars, and I suspect a lot of people make the same math. That’s what makes this so annoying. ChargePoint is very good at billing me for every minute and every quarter. It just can’t seem to get one push notification to my phone on time.
The notification system is right there
This is what really bugs me. ChargePoint already has a notification system, and it’s not shy. The app can push you alerts for charge complete, charge interrupted, and receipts, and it lets you customize push and email. (chargepoint) It knows when my car stops pulling power. It knows the price. It knows how much it’s about to hold on my card. It knows whether the session counts as account or guest, AC or DC.
And yet the two things that actually involve my money, a new per-session fee and a hold that doubled, show up as fine print, a line on a receipt, or a pending charge on my bank app. ChargePoint’s advice is to check each station’s pricing in the app before you start. (chargepoint) The hold amounts, as far as I could find, live in the FAQ, not in a notification. Shown somewhere is not the same as told to me.
There’s even a bit of irony here for plug-in hybrid owners. ChargePoint’s “charging complete” alert, as other drivers have described it, is based on the car no longer drawing power, not on the car actually being full. (rav4world) So the notification system will happily ping me about my car’s battery, sometimes wrongly, but not about my credit card.
What ChargePoint should do
None of this needs new technology. It needs a few notifications they apparently haven’t thought were worth sending:
- Tell me the hold before I plug in. “This session will place a $50 temporary hold on your card. It will be released within 7 business days.” One line on the start screen.
- Tell me why it’s different. If the hold is $50 instead of my usual $25, say why: DC station, guest payment, whatever it is.
- Itemize the service fee in the push, not just the receipt. “Energy: $X. Station fee: $Y. ChargePoint service fee: $0.25.”
- Warn me before the parking fee starts, by push, on time. If I’m going to be billed for idling, the “your car is full, move it” alert needs to hit my phone when charging ends, not land in my email an hour later.
- Send a “hold released” alert. The app tells me the second my car stops charging. It can tell me when my $50 is back.
I’m not saying ChargePoint is scamming anyone. The hold is a hold. The fee is published. On paper, it all checks out. But a notification system that can’t even tell me my car is done on time, and stays silent about what’s happening to my card, is a notification system pointed at the wrong thing.
Twenty-five cents, a temporary $50 and a $7 parking fee aren’t going to ruin my week. Finding out from my bank app instead of from ChargePoint’s app, though, is exactly the kind of small surprise that makes people trust public charging a little less. And public charging needs all the trust it can get.
