Germany's best-known fuel-price app has moved into charging properly. The interesting part is not the app — it is what it does to the price.
On 27 August 2026, Clever Tanken announced that its Clever Laden section is no longer just a price-comparison list. Through an integration with the Berlin startup Cariqa, drivers can search, compare, start and pay for a charging session inside the same app, using a debit card, credit card or PayPal. No separate charging app, no RFID card, no contract.
The pricing model is why it matters: the prices shown are the charge point operators' own, passed through without roaming surcharges.
What a roaming markup costs in Europe
Most European drivers charge on someone else's network using a card or app from a mobility provider, who settles with the operator through a roaming agreement and adds a margin. That margin is not small.
| Typical German figure | |
|---|---|
| Roaming surcharge | €0.10–0.40 per kWh |
| ADAC e-Charge at Aral pulse (partner network) | ~€0.55 per kWh |
| Same card, roaming network | ~€0.75 per kWh |
| Public price range, AC and DC | ~€0.39–0.89 per kWh |
On a 60 kWh fill, twenty cents a kilowatt-hour is €12 — a wider gap than most of the tariff differences drivers spend time optimising.
Set that against Germany's flat ad-hoc pricing: plugging in and paying at the point, with no contract, costs about 57 cents per kWh on AC and roughly 62 on DC. Ad-hoc is already often cheaper than charging on the wrong roaming card. This puts the operator's direct price in the same place.
Operators get to price by the hour
The second half of the deal is on the supply side. Through Cariqa, operators can set their own tariffs — separate day and night prices, or dynamic prices that follow expected demand at a specific station hour by hour, published up to a week ahead.
That is a real shift in a market where the public price has been strikingly static. Whether it lands as cheap overnight charging or peak-hour surcharges is not yet answerable; both are the same mechanism.
What is not disclosed
One number is missing, and it is the one that decides whether any of this is useful: neither partner will say how many charge points are reachable through Cariqa at launch. A roaming-free price is worth nothing at a station the platform cannot start.
Until that figure exists, treat this as a pricing model with an unknown footprint, not a network you can plan a route around.
Why a Tesla driver in Europe should care
A Tesla in Germany is not confined to Superchargers, and away from them it is an ordinary CCS car paying ordinary third-party prices. Tesla's own app handles Superchargers and a growing set of opened sites; everything else is a card, an app and a markup.
The pattern repeats across the continent — in what Italian charging really costs and in the four things that decide your price at an opened Supercharger in Poland. The headline per-kWh number is rarely the number you pay; intermediaries, pre-authorisation holds and tariff tiers sit between the two.
Something that deletes one of those layers — from a company whose fuel-price comparisons Germans have used since 1999 — moves in the right direction, provided the coverage is there.
"Charging and paying for electric vehicles has to work considerably more simply, transparently and fairly," said Cariqa co-founder Tamara Ciullo. The first two are addressed. The third depends on the price list.