Charge HQ Is Closing on 7 September: What Happened, and What to Use Instead

For a certain kind of Australian EV owner — solar on the roof, spreadsheet in the heart — Charge HQ was quietly one of the best apps in the country. Point it at your inverter, your charger and your car, and it did one thing beautifully: pushed your excess solar into the battery on wheels, automatically, across a bigger range of hardware brands than almost anything else. Set and forget, sunshine to kilometres.

That era ends on 7 September 2026. Amber Electric, which acquired Charge HQ and brought co-founder Jay Banyer aboard in January 2025, announced in July that it's closing the product down. Subscription charges stopped on 6 July, the app runs free until the September shutdown, and after that it's gone for good. Here's what you need to know — and, more usefully, what to do about it.

What happened

The short version: Amber bought Charge HQ for its expertise and absorbed it. In the eighteen months since the acquisition, the core smart-charging functionality Charge HQ pioneered has been folded into Amber for EVs, Amber's own product built around its wholesale-electricity-price model. With that done, Amber says its EV focus is moving to the next frontier: Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) and whole-of-home optimisation across solar, batteries and cars — citing NSW modelling that optimised V2G charging could be worth around $2,500 a year to an EV owner. A standalone solar-charging app no longer fits that strategy, so Charge HQ is being retired rather than maintained.

To Amber's credit, the wind-down is being handled decently: two months of free access to give users breathing room, a documented offboarding process, and a migration sweetener — Charge HQ customers who move to Amber get six months of Amber subscription fees free (worth $150). But decent or not, a tool many people built their daily energy routine around is going away, and "just join Amber" isn't the right answer for everyone — starting with the fact that Amber operates only in VIC, NSW, SA, the ACT and south-east Queensland. If you're a Charge HQ user in WA, Tasmania, the NT or regional Queensland, the official path simply isn't available to you.

Before 7 September: the five-minute checklist

1. Download your charging history now. Charge HQ provides a data-download tool — once the service closes, that history is gone and can't be retrieved. If you track solar self-consumption or costs, this is the record.
2. Screenshot your configuration. Your device connections, charging thresholds and schedule logic took time to dial in — capture them so you can rebuild the same behaviour in whatever comes next.
3. Plan to restore defaults after closure. Amber notes you may need to return your car or charger to its default charging behaviour once Charge HQ stops steering it — otherwise you might find the car obeying a ghost schedule (or no schedule at all) in mid-September.
4. Know the data timeline. All personal data — payment details, equipment credentials — is permanently deleted within 30 days of the 7 September closure. Nothing to do here except not rely on retrieving anything afterwards.
5. Pick your replacement before the deadline, not after. The free period exists precisely so you can test the next tool while the old one still works. Use it.

The honest replacement map, by setup

No single product replaces Charge HQ's hardware-agnostic breadth — that was its magic. The realistic path depends on what's on your roof, your wall and your driveway:

One more angle worth doing the maths on: if your feed-in tariff is down around 5c/kWh, precision solar-tracking matters less than it used to — the bigger win is simply not charging at peak prices. A good EV electricity plan with a cheap overnight window, plus a dumb timer, now gets you most of the financial benefit Charge HQ delivered, with zero moving parts. Our home charging guide below walks through the 2026 plans in detail.

The quiet lesson for EV app users

Charge HQ isn't a failure story — it was good enough that an energy retailer bought it for its brains. But its arc holds a practical lesson for anyone whose daily routine runs through a single-purpose app: products get acquired, absorbed and retired, and the more of your setup lives in someone's cloud, the more portable you want your knowledge of it to be. Keep your configuration documented, prefer open standards and hardware-level solutions where they're practical, and treat any app's export button as a friend. The energy retailers — Amber, Origin, AGL and the rest — are all racing to own the home-charging brain, which means more consolidation like this is coming, not less. None of that should stop you using great tools; it's just the seatbelt.

The other half of your charging life

Full disclosure: Plugroo is not a home solar optimiser, and we won't pretend to replace that half of Charge HQ — the table above is the genuine answer there. But if you were a Charge HQ user, you're exactly the kind of driver who squeezes real value from doing charging well — and home is only half the game. The other half happens on the road, and it's a different problem entirely: not "when is my solar peaking?" but "which public charger is working, fairly priced and actually free right now?"

That's the half Plugroo does: every Australian charging network on one map with prices compared side by side, live community check-ins so you know a charger's real status before you drive to it, filters for plug type, speed and free charging, and Smart Pick to recommend the right charger for the stop you're actually making (our AI features are in beta and improving with every release). Home optimised, road optimised — the whole charging life sorted.

Key takeaways

1. Charge HQ closes permanently on 7 September 2026; billing stopped 6 July, and the app is free until shutdown so you can transition calmly.
2. Run the checklist now: download your charging history (unrecoverable after closure), screenshot your configuration, and plan to restore your car or charger's default behaviour.
3. The official path — Amber for EVs, with six months of fees free — is genuine but not universal: it means switching retailer, and it's unavailable in WA, Tasmania, the NT and regional Queensland.
4. The durable alternatives are setup-specific: Tesla's Charge on Solar, solar-aware hardware like the Zappi or Wattpilot, self-hosted evcc for tinkerers, or a simple timer plus a good EV tariff.
5. With feed-in tariffs at ~5c, avoiding peak-price charging now matters more than perfectly tracking solar — a cheap overnight window captures most of the value.
6. The broader lesson: document your setup and prefer portable solutions — energy retailers are consolidating home-charging software, and more app retirements will follow.

Sources & further reading: Amber Electric — "We're saying goodbye to Charge HQ" (July 2026 announcement: timeline, data handling, migration offer and V2G reasoning) and the Charge HQ closing-down FAQ, data-download and offboarding guides at chargehq.net; Amber for EVs product and availability information; manufacturer documentation for Tesla Charge on Solar, myenergi, Fronius and SolarEdge; the evcc open-source project. Product features, offers and availability change — confirm details with each provider before switching. Plugroo has no commercial affiliation with any provider mentioned.

Last updated: July 2026 · Author: Plugroo Team