Sarai

Methodology

How we know a charger is real

Anyone can publish a list of charging stations. The question worth answering is where each entry came from, who checked it, and what happens when it stops working. This page answers that for all 105 stations on this site, with the counts — and it is regenerated from the listing itself on every build, so it cannot drift from what the pages actually say.

105stations published
37verified
3flagged as faulty
51held back from publication

Where it comes from

Three sources, all of them declared

We are not going to claim every one of these was surveyed by hand, because that would not be true and you have no way to check it. What is true is that nothing is published without being reviewed, nothing is published twice, and the pipeline below is what each record goes through regardless of where it entered.

The pipeline

What every listing goes through

De-duplicatedA new record is matched against everything already held — by location, name and operator. A charger that already exists is merged into the existing entry rather than added beside it, which is why you will not find the same petrol pump listed three times here.
Geocoded and checkedThe coordinates are validated against the stated address. A pin that lands in the wrong city, or a listing with no usable location at all, does not get published — it is held until someone fixes it.
Reviewed before publishingA human approves each submission. Records can be hidden, corrected or removed afterwards, and a charger the operator has taken down stays down — we honour the withdrawal rather than the row still being in the table.
Confirmed by driversAnyone who charges at a station can confirm it in the app. A confirmation is what turns a listing into a Verified one, and it is shown on the station's page.
Flagged when it failsA driver who finds a charger broken reports it in two taps. The station is marked Flagged by drivers, and — this is the part that matters — the trip planner stops routing anyone through it until it is confirmed working again.
Claimed by the ownerA site owner can claim their listing with documents. A claimed charger becomes a managed one: live status over OCPP, the operator's own pricing, and their own opening hours instead of a guess.

What we actually hold

Completeness, stated plainly

98% · connectors
103 of 105 stations record which plugs they carry, which is what decides whether your car can use them at all.
87% · price
91 carry a price per kWh. Where one is missing the page says so rather than guessing, and the app shows the real price before you start.
71% · phone
75 have a number you can ring before driving there — the single most useful field on a charger nobody has confirmed recently.
39% · opening hours
41 have a day-by-day schedule. The rest show no hours rather than an invented "24/7".
20% · photo
21 have a picture of the actual installation, which is how you find it in a car park at night.
1 · live telemetry
Stations on the Sarai platform report status over OCPP 1.6, so "available" means the charge point said so, not that nobody has complained.

A directory that showed only its best fields would look better than this. Showing the gaps is the point: you can see exactly which stations are thin before you drive to one.

What we leave out

Three things you will not find here

  • 51 private home wallboxes. The app maps 156 chargers; this site publishes 105. The difference is single-phase 7 kW units at private houses — many of them named after the owner, with a house number for an address. They are on the map in the app, where a driver can see them. They do not get a public page built to rank in Google.
  • Copied descriptions. Free text that arrived with an imported record and belongs to another site's pages is stripped, not republished. Where a page has a driver note, it is a real one.
  • Invented reviews and ratings. A rating appears only where there is a real one behind it. We do not attribute star ratings to unnamed drivers to fill a gap, which is a thing that happens in this category.

Everything computed

Numbers on this site are worked out, not typed

Every figure on every page is derived from the listing at build time. The charging cost at a station is its own price per kWh against the battery of the car you picked. The distance from a city centre is measured, not estimated. A route's stops are planned by the same rule the app uses, against real road geometry, and the page says plainly when a car cannot make the run. A quoted range is derated for the test standard it was measured on — the working is shown.

Nothing on this site is a hand-written constant that can go stale while the data underneath it moves. When a charger's price changes, every page that quotes it changes with it.

Questions

Questions about the data

Where does Sarai's charging station data come from?

Three places: the Sarai platform itself, where chargers report over OCPP; drivers adding stations in the app; and open charging datasets and public directories. This page breaks down how many come from each. Everything, whatever its source, is de-duplicated, geocoded and reviewed before it is published.

How do you verify a charging station?

A listing is reviewed by a person before it appears. After that, drivers who charge there can confirm it in the app — that is what marks a station Verified — and drivers who find it broken can flag it, which both marks the page and stops the trip planner routing anyone through it. Site owners can claim their listing with documents, which turns it into a managed charger with live status over OCPP.

How current is the data?

The listing is pulled from the live platform on every build and the site redeploys on each refresh, so the pages follow the database. Live status on Sarai-operated chargers is in the app rather than on a static page, because a web page cannot be live. Prices are as the operator last set them, and the app shows the real price before you start a session.

What happens when a charger stops working?

A driver reports it in the app. The station is flagged on its page here, and the route planner drops it from any plan until it is confirmed working again — so a broken charger does not end up as a stop on somebody's Lahore-to-Karachi run.

Why are some stations missing a price or opening hours?

Because we do not have them, and inventing them would be worse. The completeness figures on this page are published for exactly that reason: a page with no price says it has no price rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

Can I correct a listing?

Yes, and please do. Add a missing charger or correct an existing one in the app, or tell the WhatsApp community. Corrections go through the same review as anything else, and an owner can claim a listing outright.

See it live instead

Status, price and the queue are in the app, where they can be live. Free on Android and iOS.

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