No monthly fees, no per-port fees, no transaction cuts — on MÖTEN hardware. Here's exactly what that includes, what it doesn't, and where paid plans become useful.
“Free for life” is the kind of phrase that makes lawyers nervous and buyers skeptical, in roughly equal measure. We use it carefully. Here's exactly what we mean when we say eMÖTEN CMS is free on every MÖTEN charger — what it includes, what it doesn't, and where the paid plans actually fit.
On every MÖTEN charger you buy, the eMÖTEN Charger Management System runs at no monthly cost, no per-port cost, no transaction cut, and no setup fee — for the operational life of the hardware. Specifically that includes:
That's the baseline, on MÖTEN hardware, and that's the part that doesn't have a monthly bill attached to it.
To be clear, three things are not in the free tier:
If you have third-party OCPP chargers (other vendors' hardware) and you want to manage them on the same eMÖTEN dashboard, that's a paid plan. The pricing scales by port count and is meant to recover the cost of certifying and maintaining compatibility with each third-party hardware vendor. Most multi-vendor sites end up here.
Standard reporting is included. Advanced analytics — predictive demand forecasting, revenue attribution by signage source, custom integrations with fleet management systems — sit in a paid tier. Most sites don't need these; large multi-site operators often do.
When a driver pays by credit card, the payment processor (Stripe, Square, Adyen, or a regional equivalent depending on country) charges a transaction fee. That fee is not ours and it's not avoidable — any payment system would have it. We pass it through at cost. The point is we don't add a margin on top.
The straightforward question is: how is this not a loss leader that gets pulled in two years? Three answers:
First, the software cost amortizes against hardware sales. MÖTEN sells hardware. The CMS is part of the value proposition that gets the hardware sold. The marginal cost of running CMS for one more charger, once the platform is built, is small enough that it pencils out as part of the hardware unit economics.
Second, paid tiers exist for the use cases that justify them. Multi-vendor management, advanced analytics, white-label deployments — those are paid because they consume engineering and support resources that the base tier doesn't.
Third, locked-in revenue from CMS fees creates a misaligned incentive. Vendors who charge $20/month per port for CMS make most of their long-term revenue from the SaaS, not the hardware. That creates incentives to lock customers into proprietary protocols, raise prices over time, and sell the customer base to a private equity rollup. We'd rather make our money on hardware and keep the customer relationship clean.
If you're comparing MÖTEN against vendors that charge $15–$30 per port per month for CMS, the lifetime software cost is a real line item to model. For a 20-port site at $20/port/month, that's $4,800 per year, or $48,000 over a 10-year hardware life. On MÖTEN, that's $0 on the MÖTEN ports for the same period.
Where it gets nuanced: if you have a mixed fleet of MÖTEN and non-MÖTEN chargers and want unified management, we'll quote the non-MÖTEN portion at our paid tier. We'll never charge for the MÖTEN portion.
The full eMÖTEN CMS feature list and paid-tier pricing is on the CMS product page. If you have a mixed deployment and want a quote that includes both MÖTEN and non-MÖTEN ports, send us your hardware list and we'll come back with a clean breakdown.
Send us your hardware list. We'll quote eMÖTEN CMS for the MÖTEN ports at $0 and the non-MÖTEN ports at our paid tier — with a clean breakdown so you can see exactly what you're paying for.