We build nothing
Every previous attempt at the no-driveway problem — peer-to-peer sharing, kerbside schemes, community charging — tried to create capacity. That is expensive, slow and regulatory-heavy. Nightshift redirects demand instead.
If you drive 250 miles a day and have no driveway, you buy the same electricity as everyone else and pay up to ten times more for it. Nightshift fixes the price, not the infrastructure — a guaranteed effective rate on public chargers that are already installed, already public, and already sitting idle from 10pm.
A full-time private hire driver covers 250–300 miles a day. At 3.5–4 miles per kWh that is 75–85 kWh daily and roughly 1,600 kWh a month. What it costs depends almost entirely on whether there is a driveway outside the house.
Around a third of English households have no off-street parking, and the share is far higher in the dense urban areas where private hire work concentrates. The drivers with the highest consumption in the country are systematically the ones locked out of the cheap side of the market. On thin margins, the gap between £130 and £1,248 is not an inconvenience — it is most of the profit.
Hotels, retail parks, leisure centres, pubs and business parks have spent five years installing public chargers. Almost all of them go quiet around 10 or 11pm and stay quiet until 6 or 7am. The hardware is paid for, the grid connection is paid for, the groundworks are paid for — and overnight utilisation is close to zero.
Every previous attempt at the no-driveway problem — peer-to-peer sharing, kerbside schemes, community charging — tried to create capacity. That is expensive, slow and regulatory-heavy. Nightshift redirects demand instead.
Members charge on publicly accessible chargers, on their own card, at the posted public rate, exactly as any member of the public would. No access control, no credentials, no out-of-hours liability.
Charge point operators sell electricity, not price certainty — guaranteeing a low price wherever a driver charges runs against their own commercial interest. That neutral position is the one Nightshift occupies.
Nothing about the charge itself changes. You pay the posted price on your own card at a Nightshift partner site during the overnight window, and the rebate brings your effective rate down to the guaranteed level.
The app shows partner sites in your working area and the guaranteed effective rate at each. Sites are mapped against where drivers actually live, because a 7–11 kW overnight charge means the car sits there for the night and you need to be able to walk home.
Confirm the session in the app. Location, timestamp, duration and kilowatt-hours are captured automatically. Under fifteen seconds, batch claiming for a week of sessions, and automatic capture from e-mail receipts.
Every verified session earns a fixed pence-per-kWh rebate, paid monthly. Your statement translates kilowatt-hours, rebates and subscription into a single cost-per-mile figure — the number you actually run your business by.
From April 2028 a pay-per-mile charge of around 3p is planned for electric vehicles, levied in exactly that unit. Cost per mile is about to become the number every professional driver manages by.
Worked through at a site whose posted public rate is 45p per kilowatt-hour. The driver pays the site directly, exactly as the public does. The site pays Nightshift a volume rebate on verified member sessions. Nightshift pays the driver a fixed rebate.
| Step | Flow |
|---|---|
| Driver pays the site at the posted rate | 45.0p |
| Site pays Nightshift a volume rebate | −15.0p |
| Nightshift pays the driver a fixed rebate | −10.0p |
| Driver's effective cost | 35.0p |
Promising to cover "the difference" between whatever a driver pays anywhere and a target rate is an uncapped liability, and it is why nobody offers this. Three hard constraints are built into the product from launch — which is exactly what makes the guarantee coverable.
Rebates apply at sites where the price has been pre-agreed. Charging elsewhere earns nothing. The app tells you the guaranteed rate at each site before you plug in.
The rebate is a fixed pence-per-kWh, not the gap to a target price. Maximum exposure per kilowatt-hour is known in advance and cannot move.
Each subscription tier carries a fair-use monthly kilowatt-hour ceiling, sized generously for full-time shift mileage and removing tail risk from outlier consumption.
Independent reconciliation is the primary control: each claim is matched to a real session record — time, connector, kilowatt-hours — provided by the partner site. A claim with no matching session is rejected automatically. Sessions can be claimed once. Location and timestamp are cross-checked against site coordinates, vehicles are plate-verified, and claimed consumption is checked for plausibility against the vehicle's battery and the driver's own history.
Demand aggregation, a capped price guarantee and zero hardware, combined into one platform and delivered through third-party infrastructure via a verified, capped rebate. Every operator in the adjacent space either builds infrastructure or passes through variable prices. A patent application covering the mechanism is pending.
A hotel with four 22 kW chargers idle from 11pm to 7am. Eight member sessions a night averaging 40 kWh is roughly 9,600 kWh of additional monthly volume — against a baseline of approximately zero.
You install nothing. You integrate nothing. You change no prices and no systems. Your staff do nothing: members are licensed, verified, identifiable drivers using chargers that are already publicly accessible, and the window is defined and suspendable on notice. You receive a monthly invoice and a reconciled session report.
Secondary benefits follow: utilisation figures that strengthen your own case for expanding provision, overnight footfall where 24-hour food and beverage exists, and a straightforward sustainability story about maximising the use of installed low-carbon infrastructure.
Nightshift launches city by city, starting where the driver community is densest and at least four partner sites are signed. Tell us where you drive — or where your chargers sit — and we will come to you in the right order.