Five services, openly licensed
ChargeBreak uses open data sources only. Every data object carries its source, licence and the time of the original fetch. The app shows this on every result.
| Purpose | Source | Licence and credit |
|---|---|---|
| Charge points | Open Charge Map (API v3, key required) | mostly CC BY 4.0, credit “Open Charge Map”. Individual records can be licensed differently. |
| Charge points, surroundings (bakery, café, playground …) | OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API | © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Derived databases are subject to share-alike. |
| Walking routes | OSRM, “foot” profile (routing.openstreetmap.de) | Result on OSM data (ODbL); fair-use service of the OSM community |
| Place search | Nominatim (nominatim.openstreetmap.org) | © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL; the Nominatim usage policy applies |
Your browser’s requests do not go directly to these services but to this website’s server, which limits, validates and forwards them. What is transmitted is described in the privacy policy.
What the sources do not provide
No live availability
Neither Open Charge Map nor OpenStreetMap knows the current occupancy. “Operational” there is an editorial statement and is deliberately treated as “unknown”; “not operational” becomes “out of service (not live)”. Live would only be allowed with a timestamp.
No user ratings
OpenStreetMap contains no ratings. The ratings criterion therefore counts zero points and is marked unknown.
How current is the data?
To spare the public services, responses are cached. What is shown is always the time of the original fetch – a cache hit does not make data “younger”.
| Data | Cache | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Charge points | 10 minutes | change comparatively often (faults, new chargers) |
| Surroundings (OSM) | 24 hours | change rarely |
| Walking routes | 24 hours | the path network changes rarely; estimates are never stored |
| Place search | 7 days | places practically never change; protects the “at most one request per second” rule |
If a source is unreachable, an expired entry may be delivered. It is then marked stale and lowers confidence.
Consideration for public services
Overpass, OSRM and Nominatim are run by volunteers and non-profit organisations and are not built for unlimited load. ChargeBreak therefore keeps minimum intervals between requests, limits the number of charge points examined, shares a server-side cache and respects wait notices (HTTP 429) from the services. If a service is busy we say so – and show no substitute data.
Attribution
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, licence ODbL. Charge-point data: Open Charge Map, mostly CC BY 4.0. Routing: OSRM on OpenStreetMap data. Place search: Nominatim.