Charging-as-a-Service sounds like a simple deal: a provider installs chargers on your property for nothing out of pocket, and you collect a share of whatever they earn. Own and Operate vs. Turnkey vs. Hybrid covers this as one of three operating models. What that article does not have room for is the contract itself, and the contract is where a good-sounding pitch turns into a ten-year commitment you cannot easily undo.
CaaS is not a lease, a revenue-share partnership, or a service contract in any pure sense. It is usually some blend of all three, and which blend you signed only becomes clear when something goes wrong: the provider gets acquired, utilization comes in below pitch, or you want to sell the property. This article is the deep dive on the mechanics: what the provider actually owns, how the revenue split works, what a minimum guarantee is and when to ask for one, how long you are locked in, and what happens to the hardware bolted to your parking lot when the term ends.
What CaaS actually bundles
A Charging-as-a-Service provider supplies the hardware, funds the installation, owns the equipment, runs the network software, and handles maintenance and driver support, in exchange for a share of the charging revenue or a monthly fee, or both. You provide the site and, in most deals, the electricity. Contracts most often run four to seven years, with five years the most common single term, sometimes with an automatic one-year renewal unless either side gives notice.
That structure is why CaaS is attractive on the surface: zero capital, zero maintenance calls, a new revenue line. It is also why the contract deserves more scrutiny than a five-minute sales call gets it. You are not evaluating a purchase. You are evaluating a multi-year business relationship with a company you cannot fire without triggering a termination clause you probably have not read closely.
How the revenue split actually works
Read the agreement for exactly three things: the percentage, the base it applies to, and who pays for electricity.
The percentage. Pure turnkey deals, where the provider absorbs all the cost and risk, commonly pay the property owner somewhere in the single digits up to around 20% of revenue as a host fee. Hybrid and revenue-share structures, where the owner puts up some capital or accepts more of the operating burden, such as routine maintenance, run much higher, commonly 50% or more back to the owner. The point is not which percentage is "right"; it is that the number moves a lot depending on who is taking on cost, capital, and maintenance responsibility, and a term sheet that only quotes a headline percentage without saying which model produced it is not comparable to anything.
Gross or net. A percentage of gross session revenue and a percentage of net revenue after the provider deducts platform, payment-processing, and network fees are two very different numbers even at the same stated rate. Ask for the deduction list in writing, and ask what happens to that list if the provider's own software costs rise mid-contract.
Who pays for power. In most CaaS deals, you keep paying the electric bill and the provider's per-kWh price to drivers already has a markup built in to cover that. Confirm this explicitly. A revenue-share number that looks generous can still put you underwater if you are also covering a demand-charge-heavy electric bill the pitch never modeled for your actual rate schedule. Pricing Your Charging walks through how that cost floor gets built; ask the provider for their assumed dollar-per-kWh cost, not just their sample gross revenue projection, and check it against your own utility bill.
Minimum guarantees: not universal, but worth asking for
A minimum guarantee (sometimes called a minimum annual guarantee or a fixed lease payment) is a clause that pays you a set floor amount regardless of how much charging revenue the site actually generates. It is not a default feature of CaaS contracts. It shows up in some deals as a fixed lease payment layered on top of or instead of a straight percentage split, and it exists specifically to protect the property owner from a low-utilization first year or two, which is exactly the period most new charging sites underperform their pitch.
If a provider's proposal leans hard on optimistic year-one utilization numbers to make the revenue share look good, that is the moment to ask for a minimum guarantee rather than take the projection on faith. A provider confident in its own utilization model should have less trouble agreeing to a floor; one that resists the idea entirely is telling you something about how confident it actually is.
Contract length and the renewal trap
Most CaaS agreements run five years, some as short as four, and providers pursuing land grabs in a market will push for terms at the ten-year-plus end. Longer terms are not inherently bad for the provider's cost recovery, since the equipment and installation cost gets amortized over the life of the deal, but they are a real constraint on you: you cannot easily renegotiate, switch providers, or reclaim the parking spaces for a different use for the length of the term.
The renewal mechanic matters as much as the initial length. A contract with automatic one-year renewals unless either party gives written notice by a specific date is common, and it is easy to miss the notice window and get locked into another year you did not intend. Put the renewal deadline on your own calendar independent of the provider's notifications, and negotiate for the shortest initial term you can get, since renewing a good relationship is easy and exiting a bad one on a ten-year contract is not.
Who owns the hardware, and what happens at exit
During the contract term, the provider owns the chargers in essentially every CaaS structure. That is the defining feature of the model: you are not financing equipment, you are hosting someone else's.
What happens at the end of the term is where "everything is negotiable" becomes the honest answer, and also the answer that means nothing was actually negotiated unless you did it in advance. The realistic outcomes, in roughly descending order of how much they favor you:
- You buy the equipment outright at a pre-agreed or fair-market price and continue operating it yourself or hand it to a new operator.
- You renew the CaaS agreement, sometimes with a hardware refresh included as part of the new term.
- The provider removes the equipment and you are left with empty conduit and a parking lot to restore, an outcome that is far more likely if you never negotiated an exit clause at all.
None of these is the default outcome unless the contract says which one is. Get the buyout price, or the formula for calculating it, in writing before you sign, not as a future conversation to have when the term is ending. The same applies to a mid-term exit: what happens if the provider is acquired, goes out of business, or simply underperforms so badly you want out early. A termination-for-underperformance clause tied to a measurable uptime or service-level standard is worth more than any verbal assurance about reliability.
Questions to ask before you sign
- What percentage of revenue do we receive, and is it calculated on gross session revenue or net revenue after platform and processing fees?
- Who pays the electric bill, and what per-kWh cost did you assume when modeling our revenue share?
- Is there a minimum guarantee or fixed lease payment, and if not, why not?
- What is the initial contract term, and does it auto-renew? What is the notice deadline to prevent that?
- Who owns the hardware at the end of the term, and what is the buyout price or formula if we want to keep it?
- What happens if you are acquired, or go out of business, mid-contract?
- What is the maintenance and uptime commitment, and what financial consequence applies if you miss it?
- If the property is sold, does this agreement transfer to the new owner, and under what terms?
Decision checklist
A CaaS contract that never gets this level of scrutiny is not necessarily a bad deal. It is an unread one. The revenue-share number on the term sheet is the easiest thing to compare between providers and the least important thing in the contract; the minimum guarantee, the exit terms, and the renewal deadline are what actually decide whether the deal you signed in year one is still the deal you are living with in year eight.
Last factually verified: September 14, 2026. This research pass had no direct access to primary CaaS-provider and analyst pages (bolt.earth, pulseenergy.io, evconnect.com, getflipturn.com, blinkcharging.com, ezevsolutions.com, sec.gov, and general references including en.wikipedia.org and energy.gov all returned a blocked-network error to direct fetch); every figure below instead comes from a search engine's own indexed snippet of the named page, cross-checked against a second, independently reachable-in-snippet source. Revenue-share ranges (turnkey host fee in the single digits to ~20%; hybrid/revenue-share 50% or more to the owner) match this site's own previously fact-checked figures in Own and Operate vs. Turnkey vs. Hybrid (verified 2026-05-24) and are consistent with search-indexed snippets of Blink Charging's turnkey business-model page and Graviti Energy's revenue-share write-up. The minimum-guarantee/fixed-lease-payment mechanism is drawn from a search-indexed snippet of bolt.earth's CaaS economics post, corroborated against generic minimum-annual-guarantee clause language (Law Insider's contract-clause library), since the full bolt.earth article itself could not be fetched and re-read directly. Contract-length figures (a five-year term most common, a four-to-seven-year range, and automatic one-year renewals) are drawn from actual filed agreements rather than vendor marketing: Maine's Efficiency Maine Trust standard EV charging incentive contract (a five-year term from commissioning), the City of Savannah, Minnesota's charging station license agreement (two consecutive five-year terms), and a charging station site host agreement between Genufood Energy Enzymes Corp. (GigaEVC) and a site host, filed publicly on Justia Contracts (a five-year term with automatic one-year renewal absent notice). End-of-term buyout and renewal outcomes are corroborated across two independently indexed provider explainers (Tridens and SWTCH Energy). EZ EV Solutions and Matcha (Matcha Electric), both already named in this site's prior reporting, were reconfirmed as active providers via a fresh search.
evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company mentioned.