Free charging and simulation

Free or included charging

Application policy, using generic charging operations. Your application decides whether charging is included in a booking, complimentary or paid. Keep eligibility, passwords and business profiles in its own database. There is no shared free-charge endpoint or free-charging password store.

For a zero-cost usage bill, create a tenant tariff with both the energy rate and authorization amount set to zero, then use an external session. Your backend confirms responsibility for funding and starts the session, reads trusted usage and finalizes its zero-cost bill. Do not report a processor capture when no money moved. Ivora Host uses this contract after checking its own policy. API identifiers and references do not contain the driver's password.

Diagram source

flowchart LR
  User[User requests charging] --> Policy[Application access or free-charge policy]
  Policy --> Start[Authorized start]
  Start --> Meter[Observe consumption]
  Meter --> Stop[Stop and confirm completion]
  Stop --> Record[Usage record without processor capture]

The managed-payment bill path remains separate: it requires a $0.50–$100 authorization and a registered payment before start. A zero-price tariff does not bypass that requirement. Direct operator commands also exist; the application must satisfy the station's token authorization configuration.

Simulation

Available. There are two distinct simulation tools. Simulated bills never reach live Stripe: in production a simulated bill paid with service stripe returns 409 simulated_live_refused.

For a simulated tenant bill, finalize with energy_wh, such as 6941. At 35 cents/kWh the energy-v1 result is 243 cents. Physical bills reject that input and require a matching completed transaction instead.

Simulator payments cannot authorize physical bills. Changing source is not a way to attach synthetic energy to a real charge. Read testing coverage.