Every good idea starts with a small, specific frustration. Ours was standing next to an e-bike with a nearly empty battery, phone in hand, with no reliable way to answer a simple question: where can I actually charge this?
The chargers were out there — outside cafés, at bike parks, tucked under shelters. But the knowledge of where they were lived in people’s heads, not on any map you could open when you needed it. That gap is the reason Denchargi exists.
Why not just build another database? #
The obvious move would have been to collect charging points into our own database and guard them as the thing that makes the app worth using. We deliberately didn’t.
A private database has a fatal flaw for something like this: it’s only as good as the company behind it, and it dies with them. Charging points move, close, and appear all the time. Keeping that current is not a job one small team can do — it’s a job for the people who ride past these spots every day.
So Denchargi is built on OpenStreetMap, the free, open map of the world maintained by a global community. When you add or confirm a charging point in the app, it doesn’t go into a vault we own — it goes back to the shared map. That means your contribution helps every cyclist, in every app built on the same open data, not just the people who happen to use ours.
What that changes #
Building on open data quietly settles a lot of decisions for us:
- No ads, no tracking. The value of Denchargi isn’t your attention or your routes — it’s the map, and the map belongs to everyone already.
- No account just to look. You only sign in when you want to give something back by adding or verifying a point.
- It gets better on its own. Every rider who adds a spot makes the next person’s search a little easier. The map compounds.
That’s the whole philosophy in one line: a tool for cyclists, powered by data that belongs to cyclists.
If you’ve ever been caught out with a low battery and nowhere obvious to top up, this one’s for you. Happy charging. 🚲⚡