Should You Start With 1, 5 or 20 Phone Charging Stations?

Count venues, not machines. When you're working out how many charging stations to buy (for phones, not EVs), order the number you can get signed, installed and online within about 30 days of delivery. Placed in full, a 20-pack is the cheapest way to own a working station: about $852 each with shipping, at list prices at the time of writing. Half placed, it's about $1,705 each, more than buying singles at full price.

What 1, 5, 10 and 20 stations cost, all in

All prices here are list prices on our products page at the time of writing; shipping is as shown at checkout.

Every J8 Pro ships with 8 power banks (Lightning and USB-C cables built in), a tap-to-pay card reader and a built-in 4G SIM with Wi-Fi backup. There are no monthly fees. Two costs are easy to miss: extra stands at $150 each plus shipping, and spare power banks at $200 per 10 for the ones that don't come back.

Cost per working station: 5 placed vs 20 half placed

A bundle's per-station price assumes every station is working: placed in a venue and online. Divide what you spent by the working stations instead:

Fully placed, the 20-pack costs about 10% less per working station than the 5-pack. Half placed, it costs about 80% more, worse than buying singles at full price. A 20-pack needs 18 of 20 placed just to match a fully placed 5-pack.

None of that depends on what a station earns. Now put money on it. Say a working station takes in $75 a month in rentals. Your 80% is $60. Say you pass $10 of that to the venue (many venues host for nothing as a guest amenity; others want a share you negotiate). That leaves $50, a number picked for easy arithmetic, not a prediction, so the table runs two weaker cases too. Months to cover = all-in hardware cost ($4,745 or $17,050) ÷ the monthly total.

The fully placed 20 is the strongest column. In the $50 example, it would leave you $1,000 a month before other costs and cover its cost a little faster than the 5-pack. The half-placed 20 takes 15 months longer than the 5-pack and ties up about $12,300 more of your cash. The same 10 working stations from a 10-pack would cost about $8,190 less.

Halve what you keep to $25 and every timeline doubles, adding 17 to 34 months. That's far more than the 2 months a fully placed 20 saves over a 5-pack. In slow rooms, no bundle covers its cost in any reasonable time, and a station in a venue that doesn't rent may never cover it. The fix there is the venue, not the order, which is why the 30-day relocation test exists.

Every month count here is before the costs that pull the other way: replacement banks, stands, gas, maintenance, taxes, your time, and slow weeks. Count them and every timeline gets longer. To build an estimate for your own venues, see how to estimate what a kiosk makes.

How many charging stations to buy for the venues you have

The cheapest way to buy at today's list prices, for the number of venues that will take a station within 30 days of delivery:

With 3 of 5 placed, a 5-pack works out to about $1,582 per working station, more than three singles. At 4 venues, the 5-pack costs less in total than 4 singles ($4,745 against $4,940) and leaves you a demo unit. If your count falls in a gap, ask about a custom bundle on a call.

The real constraint: signed venues and your hours

Ordering 20 stations takes five minutes. Getting 20 owners to say yes takes a long list, because most pitches end in "no" or "not yet". No one, including us, can promise a venue will say yes. Before choosing a bundle, count:

• Committed venues. Yeses from the person who can actually decide. A shift manager's "sounds cool" doesn't count, and at a chain, "corporate has to approve" means not yet. A second meeting booked is a maybe, not a yes.
• Your list. Say one owner in five you pitch signs. Then a 5-pack means about 25 pitches, and a 20-pack about 100 venues you actually walk into.
• Your hours. Say each placement takes three visits (scout it on a busy night, meet the owner on a weekday afternoon, come back with the agreement) plus the install: about 5 hours with driving. At 10 hours a week, that's 2 placements a week from a warm list. A 5-pack fits inside 30 days with room to spare. A 20-pack takes 10 weeks of everything going right. After that, the hours go to portal checks, moving banks and the odd site visit.

For two weeks before you order, track venues walked into, owners who agreed to talk again, yeses, and hours spent. Then swap your own ratio and hours in for ours. No numbers yet? Order only for venues that have already said yes. Our venue pitch guide covers what to say once you're in the door.

The rule we'd use is buy what you can place within 30 days of delivery. Ask for the current ship estimate when you order, line up venues while it's in transit, and don't give a venue an install date until you have tracking.

Unplaced machines earn nothing, and they still cost you

A station on your shelf gets no rentals, no screen views and no venue relationship. It still costs you:

• The warranty clock is running. The 3-year limited warranty starts at delivery, not at install.
• You can't send it back. Under our refund policy, an order cancelled before it ships is refunded in full. After shipment, only defective units can be returned.
• It pushes you toward weak venues. Ten boxes in the spare room make every yes look good, including the gym, the office lobby and the clinic waiting room. In our experience those rarely rent, and you end up relocating stations that never should have gone out.

One exception: a demo unit you carry on walk-ins is doing a job until the last venue on your list says yes. Otherwise, a machine in a venue tells you what rents in your town. A machine in a closet tells you nothing.

Picture two operators starting in one city the same week. Dana buys the 20-pack, places 10 in two months, then spends her evenings driving to a third town while 10 boxes sit in the spare room. Marcus buys the 5-pack and places all 5 on one strip within a month. In month two he sees that his two late-night bars rent and the café doesn't, so he moves that one to a hotel lobby. His next order, a 10-pack, is for venues he lined up meanwhile, and he knows which venue types rent in his town. He has 15 working stations for about $13,605. Dana, at 15 placed, has spent $17,050.

Our first 30 days guide has the week-by-week plan for getting every box out.

Go deep in one metro before you go wide

Five stations in one district beat five in five towns:

1. Returns. A renter can drop a bank into any free slot at any JB Charging station. If five of yours are within a few blocks, a guest who rents at one bar can return at the next. A lone station may be the only drop point in town.
2. Restocking. Each slot charges the bank it holds, so restocking means moving banks from a full station (no free slot for returns) to one that's run low (nothing to rent). Close together, that's one loop. Spread out, it's a day of driving.
3. Relationships. Your first install becomes the demo for the next walk-in: "There's one two doors down. Go rent from it." And when something goes wrong, it's a 10-minute drive, not a 90-minute one.

The test: draw the loop you can drive in one afternoon, and fill it before you buy for the next town. It's full when every good-fit venue in it (late hours, people waiting, an owner on site) has heard your pitch and the last several said no. Then draw the next loop beside it, not across the state.

A sequencing plan: pilot, prove, expand

Buying in steps costs less than it looks. At list prices at the time of writing, reaching 20 stations as a 5-pack, then a 10-pack, then another 5-pack costs about $18,350, or about $1,300 more than one 20-pack. That's about $65 a station, and you never own a box you can't place.

Let the list of waiting venues trigger the next order, not one great month.

Checklist: are you ready for 1, 5, 10 or 20?

Start with 1 to 3 singles if

• One to three venues want a station now, or you want to learn the hardware, the portal and the pitch before committing.
• Below 4 placed, singles cost less per working station than a 5-pack (about $1,235 against $1,582 with 3 of 5 placed).

You're ready for 5 if every one of these is true

• At least 4 venues have said yes, from the person who can decide, and you're in a real conversation with a fifth.
• All 5 fit in one afternoon loop.
• Walk-in time is on your calendar for the 4 weeks after delivery: weekday afternoons for owners, one busy night a week to scout.
• You know which venues need a floor stand (2 come in the box; more are $150 each plus shipping).
• You could carry the full ~$4,745 even if the stations take far longer than you hope to cover it, or never do.

You're ready for 10 if

• Everything on the 5 list holds for 9 or 10 venues, not 5. The 10-pack needs 9 placed to beat a 5-pack plus singles, and all 10 to beat a fully placed 5-pack.

You're ready for 20 if every one of these is true

• Every station you already own is placed and online.
• You have two 30-day cycles of per-venue numbers, and you've moved or pulled the weak ones.
• You have a written list of at least 18 venues ready to take a station. That's where the 20-pack beats a fully placed 5-pack.
• Most of those venues are in the metro you already work.
• You've budgeted for stands beyond the 10 included, spare banks, and the time to keep 20 relationships going.

If any answer on the 20 list is no, size down to the venues you actually have.

Next step

Bring your venue list to a call and we'll help you size your first order to it: book a call. Or run the numbers on our calculator, which shows gross rentals before JB's 20% and any venue share.

Examples are illustrative only, not a forecast or a typical result. What a station earns depends on the venue, placement, pricing, local demand, and how actively you run it.