When the first generation of charge point operators started scaling their networks, commissioning a commercial CPMS was not a credible option. The platforms available were early-stage, often tied to specific hardware families, and rarely built for the complexity a growing operator actually faced: multi-market tariff structures, multi-party roaming, enterprise billing integrations, hardware from manufacturers who would not certify anyone else’s software.
So operators built. The decision was rational. A well-resourced internal team could construct something that matched the exact requirements of the business, without vendor constraints or product roadmaps shaped by someone else’s customers and priorities. The commercial CPMS market had not yet produced a platform worth trusting with the core of an operator’s operations.
Those platforms served real purposes. Many still run thousands of charge points today. The case for building them was sound. What has changed is whether the same logic still holds.
A pattern the software industry has seen before
Two decades ago, a comparable transition played out in enterprise software, driven by the same structural conditions: a category that matured faster than incumbents expected, and a rational choice that shifted with it. Companies running custom-built CRM tools were not making a mistake. The commercial alternatives were either immature or, in Siebel’s case, built around license models and implementation cycles that were impractical for most organisations without a dedicated consulting budget. Building something that fit the actual requirements of the business was the rational choice.
Salesforce’s emergence did not simply introduce a better product. It matured the category to the point where the calculation shifted. Siebel peaked at 45% of the CRM market in 2002. Four years later, the default had changed entirely. Companies that continued building and maintaining their own CRM infrastructure after that inflection point were not making a principled stand; they were absorbing engineering overhead that had stopped making competitive sense. Nobody argues they were wrong to build in the first place; the category matured around them and the rational choice shifted.
The CPMS market is making the same transition. For operators running proprietary platforms, the category has matured. The remaining question is whether to act while options are still open, or to wait until the platform becomes a serious operational constraint.
AMPECO is built on that premise: infrastructure maintenance handled centrally across 200+ operators, differentiated capabilities owned and built by each network.
What has actually changed
Three things have shifted meaningfully since most in-house CPMS decisions were made.
Commercial platforms have advanced substantially since 2016
Most operators who evaluated the commercial market at the time and concluded the options were too immature, too inflexible, or too hardware-dependent were right. The problem is that many of those same operators have not revisited that conclusion since. What is commercially available now is materially different from what existed when most in-house decisions were made: broader API surface, genuine hardware agnosticism, and the ability to absorb regulatory compliance updates at the platform level rather than passing them to each operator’s own team.
The regulatory compliance burden has grown materially
AFIR payment terminal compliance landed in April 2024. ISO 15118-20 for public charging became a requirement in January 2026. ISO 15118-20 for semi-public and private networks follows in January 2027. OCPP 2.0.1 is already a qualifying criterion in public tenders across Northern Europe and increasingly in DACH. Each of these is a dedicated engineering sprint for an in-house team. The cumulative sprint load across a 36-month window is not a projection for any operator currently maintaining a proprietary platform; it is their live backlog. Each obligation represents scheduled engineering time that cannot simultaneously go toward new market entry, revenue features, or improving the core driver experience.
The peer precedent among large operators is shifting
The argument for staying in-house has always drawn part of its force from the fact that peers were making the same choice. That dynamic is changing. Evolt, the UK EV charging provider with over 10,000 charge points and fifteen years of proprietary platform investment, evaluated the commercial market in 2025 and concluded it had cleared the bar. The engineer responsible for Evolt’s technical due diligence described the difference from the alternatives as standing out “miles.” When operators at that scale make a different call, the reasoning that sustained the in-house consensus loses force.
The maintenance trap
The core problem with in-house platforms is not that they fail. The model structurally prevents engineering teams from building ahead of where the market already is, because the workload required to keep the platform current is always the first claim on capacity. Every year brings a new set of obligations: OCPP version updates, OCPI roaming specifications, compliance mandates, payment terminal certifications. They expand alongside every new market and every new regulatory cycle.
The result is predictable. The team that originally built the platform to power the business gradually shifts what it spends time on. Not because anyone made a deliberate strategic choice, but because the maintenance queue grows faster than the innovation backlog can be cleared. When a regulatory deadline arrives, it pulls priority from the feature scheduled for Q2. When a firmware update breaks a hardware edge case, the engineers debugging it are the same engineers who were supposed to be designing what comes next.
What the market now expects
When most in-house CPMS platforms were built, the expectations placed on EV charging operators were materially lower. Drivers accepted rough edges; investors treated the sector as long-horizon infrastructure with no near-term delivery pressure; regulators were still drafting the rules that would eventually mandate specific protocols and payment standards.
That window has narrowed. In the mature markets of Northern and Western Europe and DACH, it has largely closed.
Investors evaluating EV charging operators today apply the same lens they apply to any scaled service business: predictable margins, low cost-to-serve, and a product roadmap centred on differentiation rather than infrastructure upkeep. An engineering team whose capacity is consumed by platform maintenance becomes an overhead line on the P&L that requires active justification at board level. Operators who can demonstrate lean operations, high uptime, and development capacity directed at their actual market position tell a more credible story than those still absorbing compliance work through internal headcount, and that difference shows in how investors model the business.
Driver expectations have reached a comparable standard. Session reliability across hardware types, payment processing that works without friction, roaming that functions as advertised: none of these impress a driver today, but failing any of them produces complaints that sit in search results for months.
The cost of staying is rarely calculated
Most operators who have evaluated migration eventually run the full numbers: how much engineering headcount is actually attributed to platform maintenance, what it has cost to keep deferring the features on the backlog, how far the compliance cycle lags what the market now requires, and what that gap will cost in 2027.
The regret, when it arrives, is rarely about the original build. It is about the compounding cost of a decision that felt settled but was not: the accumulated overhead of staying, not the logic of the original choice.
The decision to remain on an in-house platform is rarely a deliberate one. It accumulates as the default, until something makes the cost visible to the board. A missed regulatory deadline. A difficult stretch after a senior engineer who carries years of institutional platform knowledge leaves. A competitor shipping features that have been sitting on the backlog for eighteen months.
Operators who evaluate migration before those inflection points have the most degrees of freedom. The timeline is not compressed, the platform team is still engaged, and the scope of any transition can be defined properly rather than shaped by crisis. Those who wait find the platform team worn down, the timeline compressed by a live crisis, and the internal case far harder to make.
The question worth asking
The operators who built in-house made the right call for the conditions they were operating in. The argument is not that they were wrong; it is that the conditions have changed, and the rational choice has shifted alongside them.
The question worth asking is not historical; it is what the platform is currently costing: not in licence fee comparisons, but in engineering capacity directed at commodity infrastructure instead of differentiation, in regulatory sprints instead of new market entry, in maintenance mode instead of building ahead.
To run that calculation for a specific operation — what the commodity overhead costs, what it is preventing from being built, and where the current platform stands against what best-in-class platforms offer today — The In-House CPMS Benchmark maps the picture across seven capability dimensions.
If this question is worth examining in your organisation, these posts go deeper on specific parts of it:
What Are Your In-House CPMS Engineers Actually Building? — the framework for mapping your team’s workload against the commodity/differentiation split, and what the picture actually looks like on most in-house sprint boards.
The In-House CPMS Costs Nobody Talks About — the costs that do not appear in any budget line, and the questions worth putting to your leadership team before the gap compounds further.
