Data Sources

Our primary station database. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory maintains the most comprehensive directory of alternative fuel stations in the United States, covering 65,000+ EV chargers across all 50 states. We query this API for station location, connector types, power output, network affiliation, access hours, and last-updated timestamps.

For faster page loads we serve a pre-built snapshot of the NREL dataset from a CDN edge cache. This snapshot is rebuilt regularly via an automated pipeline. When the CDN is unavailable the app falls back to a live NREL query, and if that also fails it uses a local mock dataset so the UI always loads.

Map tiles rendered from OpenStreetMap data. OpenFreeMap provides free, self-hostable vector tile services without API keys or usage limits. We use the Liberty basemap style for the interactive locator map.

Address and place-name geocoding. When you search for a city, zip code, or street address we send that query to a Nominatim-compatible geocoding endpoint to convert it into coordinates, then find nearby stations. No user location data is stored.

Each station receives a 0-100 reliability score computed on the client from publicly available signals: data source type (CDN vs. NREL vs. mock), network identification, listed access hours, power rating, connector diversity, fast-charge availability, and data freshness. Stations are tiered as high, medium, or low confidence, and risk flags like stale data or missing power ratings are surfaced so you can make informed decisions.

Directions are handled by linking out to Google Maps or Apple Maps rather than routing in-app. This means we never process or store your navigation data.