Tesla announces third party API pricing

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There have been lots of questions around this over the last several months, and here it is! (fun fact: I'll owe Tesla around $60 million per year using current rates)

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So essentially they are killing third party development with pricing?

Legacy OEMs will probably never offer this

What does this mean for Tessie?

Oof. Not good for us data nerds.

Maybe Tesla can afford to make an Apple Watch app now.

Pulling a Reddit, hate to see it.

That's the Reddit API model!

Is there a way for Tessie to use personal API keys for each user? Of course that'll make first-time setup a bit more complex, but maybe as a choice?

So how does this impact something like TeslaMate or use with Home Assistant? What about Teslemetry?

I’m so sorry I love your app and this is insane.

Jesus

Serious question. If Tesla is going to charge for API usage, can WE charge Tesla for our internet bandwidth that TESLA uses every night when they upload all our driving footage for FSD training? Edit (what I said in a reply): The telemetry data consent doesn’t mention it’s going to upload all of your driving footage and thus uses tons of data. It only mentions the camera as “external camera data” Stuff like this should be crystal clear for the customers who aren’t as technically aware.

Seems like users can sign up for a free account and get a $10 credit per month, which they claim will cover 2 cars with average usage. This will hit the big apps pretty hard I assume. I wonder how much efficiency can be squeezed out of the way they currently work. Some of this pricing seems pretty steep. EDIT: The fact that the free credit is $10/mo, which is double what some of these third party apps charge, makes me believe they will not survive without major changes or price increases.

Great question—Tesla helps itself to hundreds of gigabytes of data a month from me. Guess I’m turning it off, I’m not helping them train FSD and mooch my bandwidth if they won’t even let me query my car’s info without paying. I love TeslaFi.

This!

And Musk was talking about doing more with compute when cars are idle, which goes to our electric bill.

The current rates will put the majority (if not all) third-party services, including my own. To provide the same frequency of data would cost Teslascope 7.5x its monthly revenue. ....

You lose charge stats from this unfortunately.

Finally! 🙌

They're dead in the water.

You agree to share the cost of that when you opt in to share telemetry data. Only thing you can do is turn off sharing.

Are you gonna make Nest or Ring pay for your video bandwidth too?

Teslamate was one reason to keep me in the ecosystem. Obviously a minor one, but it's another anchor being removed.

My kingdom for a watch app that works.

Basically all third party Tesla apps will have to shut down. This is an approach used by companies all the time to force third party apps to cease operations. Twitter and Reddit recently did this exact same thing.

Bruh

This is not a good thing.

Not bad for personal use. Tessie can license it to you to self host or do something to make it person. Each of us need to obtain our own api key

The telemetry data consent doesn’t mention it’s going to upload all of your driving footage and thus uses tons of data. It only mentions the camera as “external camera data” Stuff like this should be crystal clear for the customer who aren’t as technically aware.

If you’re in a situation where you have a metered connection you shouldn’t be sharing data with any service to begin with. This is hardly a Tesla specific inconvenience.

Yeah, but how much have you made with your app already? Share the information we all want to actually know.

Again, there is a huge difference between “telemetry” and gigabytes worth of video footage. It needs to be crystal clear what people are opting into. There’s not even a “this will use large amounts of data” statement anywhere.

It looks like individuals will get $10 monthly credit so it seems this could work for TeslaMate since it’s self hosted.

Just connect to Wi-Fi when updates drop. Problem solved.

There’s a difference between a product that’s expected to use data to provide video footage, versus a car saying telemetry data and external camera data without mentioning the sheer volume of it or at least a warning that it’ll consume large amounts of data.

That'll make the backend a lot more complicated most likely, and if it's costing him 60 million a year, I have to imagine that personal API keys won't help that much. I doubt half a million people are using Tessie.

Is the title a bit too wide scoped ? Fleet API is different than Owner API (e.g used by Teslamate instances). While I understand Tesla explicitly said they’ll ask for business fleet users to move to the fleet API as owner API is being shutdown for them, I’m not sure they have (short term) plans to shutdown the owner API for individual users ?

How to see how many requests we need per day? Wonder how long the credit even covers

Based on what they said it costs, I highly doubt that personal use will cover it. It sounds like it's probably around $30-$50 a car for what Tessie pulls at least. With my understanding of how signals work this is particularly egregious. Effectively they are sending data over your own connection to your own server and charging you for the privilege. At a minimum signal data should be free with premium connectivity.

We need to know :(. Is this the end of Tessie? We love Tessie :(.

Welp welp welp. Sad but what can you do

This should be a top priority, shouldn’t be hard to do.

No kidding. As a tinkerer I'd been playing with the Owner API from late 2018 until they enacted the first fleet access changes that shut off the old API in January of this year. Admittedly I was fast and loose, polling the sleep status every 5 seconds 24x7, gathering full vehicle info whenever awake, and never bothering to touch the streaming API. Quick math suggests I probably made about 32 million API calls to my car in that time. Not all were full requests, but assuming they were (about 7 kB of data each) I would've pulled 224 GB of data over 5 years. At the current rates I would've owed $65k USD (more than the car itself) just to have those ~5 years of stats on my own car, lol.

Do you mind sharing any details on roughly how many calls Tessie makes per vehicle per month? I'm trying to get a rough idea of how that 60 million breaks down.

If FSD came with the car this argument would make sense. You buy a Nest or a Ring specifically for its ability to use your network to provide you something you want. Tesla is using your network to provide Tesla with something that doesn’t benefit you unless you also choose to give Tesla an extra $100 per month. Not a good comparison at all.

As per [Tessie's Stats](https://stats.tessie.com/) they have 471k vehicles, wow...

My comment was from the perspective of as a software engineer I’ve wanted an easier way to be able to build a dashboard and some automation for my Tesla products and this would make it easier, for me. I didn’t calculate the economic impact on 3rd party products.

Yea, these rates are criminal

Correct me if I’m wrong but the Fleet API is for businesses to manage their vehicles; there is still no OFFICIAL api for developers to build apps that allow individual owners to interact with their vehicles?

How about they spend more time and build an Apple Watch app before trying to milk money from developers

It’s not. At all. Really annoying they still don’t have one

On Teslas website they make it seem like it would be enough for 1-2 personal vehicles. TBH though I don’t know enough of the technical details to understand what kind or how many requests are made per day for something like TeslaMate.

Every 30 seconds when the car is awake and busy (driving, charging, Sentry Mode, etc.) Assuming someone leaves Sentry on (common) and the car stays busy, and there are 43,829 minutes in a month, that's 87,658 calls per month. At $1 per 500 requests, that's $175 for one month for one vehicle - not counting wakes or commands. In the worst case, where all vehicles are subscribed and all vehicles have Sentry on, it's actually 470,000 vehicles \* $175 = $82,250,000 per month or $987,000,000 per year. Plus wakes and commands. Might put it over a billion dollars a year? 😉

Ouch. Sorry for that news. It's reddit all over.

Oh nice, so you actually are pretty close to the 500k vehicle mark. Congrats on that! Does the telemetry feature help at all with that since 150k signals is only $1 instead of using data calls? Wasn't clear if they were charging per piece of information or per information set with their definition of a signal. If it's per full data set sent, then that's only 70 cents or so per vehicle which is a lot more reasonable though still expensive for what it is in my opinion. I have a feeling it's likely per individual stat though which is pretty absurd since it's all one data packet and an entire packet even with 200 elements only costs them a few KB of bandwidth and no compute. It would be effectively charging $1 per MB of bandwidth which is beyond insane. (Update: confirmed each field is a signal. That's obscene. They do, at least, only send on change in state, but still, they are charging $1 per MB even if the car is on customer provided Wi-Fi. To say I'm exceedingly disappointed in Tesla for that would be a tremendous understatement. Here's hoping clearer heads prevail.)

We all know what it means

Hold on. Tesla gets to collect my data, free of charge, and then charges me to get it back? I understand there’s infra costs here, but this general concept should be illegal. $10 credit per month is unreasonable with their pricing. For alerts and real-time tele, one can easily hit the API over 60k times in a month for a single car.

Feel like I'm slowly losing reasons to buy another Tesla when I go to replace my M3.

It's not even close. It'll cover about two days maybe three. The fees are exorbitant. They even charge you $1 per MB or so for your own bandwidth with something that has literally no cost to them.

Look at the economic impact even on your own usage. Their rates are obscenely expensive with even the data streaming, which is free to them if you are on Wi-Fi or minimally expensive if on cellular, for around $1000 per gigabyte of bandwidth with absolutely zero compute cost on their side. It's literally just the car sending a data packet to your web server. 150,000 data points that each are around 2-8 bytes costs $1. The $10 a month doesn't even cover sending 30 individual pieces of information a minute.

:(

The Owner API has already been blocked from sending commands. It continues to work for data retrieval for now, but has been turned off for a day or two occasionally. Glitches? Testing planned depreciation? Time will tell.

That requires Tesla to give personal API keys. The application form is asking for a description of your usage so I doubt that will fly.

Wow that’s insane. That’s audacious of them

Enough so that if it doesn't change significantly I'm unlikely to buy another Tesla and up until tonight I fully expected every car I buy from now on to be a Tesla. Trying to extort excessive profit from my own hardware using my own bandwidth is a surefire way to make sure I never do business with a company in any way ever again.

Would it be possible for Tessie to work in some way at that free personal API allowance level Tesla mentions?

This is 100% what I’m feeling, might be looking at other options (if they have NACS) when the time comes

The main concern with Fleet Telemetry (at its current point) is that not all data points are available from vehicle\_data (all developer's go-to endpoint for the last half a decade). For a lot of functionality currently offered by third-parties, we depend on this endpoint (which is 300x more expensive than the streaming signals). The "requests" also include getting your vehicles list (and checking for new vehicles, since nothing is worse than taking delivery of a new vehicle and missing the first drive home), trim information, subscriptions, release notes, drivers access, and a ton more. The problem with switching to streaming signals is that it is not yet a good solution for most third parties either (at least at the current pricing; most emphasis is placed on this). This is explained below: Over 150 unique data points are currently available via vehicle\_data (assuming all of these data points are made available within the next 30 days). If an app wishes to transition entirely to Fleet Telemetry, it must include all these data points in its configuration. On Teslascope, while driving/charging, we poll for data once every thirty seconds, so our configuration interval would be the same. During a drive, it's assumed that at least \~40 fields are streamed per 30 seconds. This is already very modest; some apps request far more frequently for more detailed metrics and analytics. If a vehicle drives for an hour, that's \~ 5,000 signals sent. If the vehicle plugs in overnight at home, as Tesla recommends, this could be an 8-hour charging session. That's \~ 40,000 signals sent. A straightforward month of a single Tesla vehicle could result in 1,350,000 streaming signals. This is already $9 a month/vehicle. Next, we have to consider commands. If we allow automation or scheduling, and a vehicle sends 20 commands daily, that'll add another $0.60-$1.00 a month. Lastly, we consider data requests we can't avoid as aforementioned. We can safely assume this will add at least $1.00 a month, not to take away any live features or degrade the experience of current members. Our app, which currently charges $3/per Tesla Account, would need to start charging at least \~$12 per vehicle immediately or otherwise pass through the API costs, which would be very complex to automate, if not impossible, without additional APIs that would allow us to poll for this information on a per-vehicle basis (which are not available at the time of writing). This would cost $12,000/month for a thousand vehicles. For Tessie, with its 470,000 vehicles, it would be $5,640,000 per month. While this is still substantially better than the $82,250,000 quoted above, it eliminates the majority of their revenue. This also does not consider infrastructural costs, which I can only imagine might be substantial. u/TessieDev While I know many developers love providing positive experiences for the million vehicle owners who collectively use third-party apps every day, this would no longer be financially viable, or otherwise risk bankrupting the majority in about thirty days. Based on my use case and the average usage of other developers, this would substantially impact 99% of third-party apps. We are unsure if we can proceed with providing service in January without substantial changes to pricing and data availability via Fleet Telemetry. As always, I remain hopeful. ❤️

Between this, failed promises on future cars, and FSD not ever living up to the hype (early 2017 adopter), my current Tesla will be my last. Not to mention Elons stupid fucking political games.

Fun Fact: Teslemetry will owe Tesla around $900,000 per year at our current rate. That's more than 25x my revenue.

Yeah, this lines up with my analysis. The fact signals don't send if they haven't changed would likely reduce overnight charging usage considerably, but it's still an obscene price. Given there is zero compute cost for Tesla and basically no bandwidth cost, it should either be 150,000 updates (not fields, but rather each overall update for all requested fields) and no cost when sending over WiFi or should be $1 per 15 million signals. (That would still be around $10/GB of bandwidth, a lot of which would be covered by the customer rather than cellular.) Commands are expensive, but at least that actually goes through Tesla's systems. The price isn't good but it's less bad than the data streaming BS.

Same. It seems like Tesla is prioritizing cost cutting at every avenue recently. The glory days of owning a Tesla are over IMO.

It's going to cost me 25x revenue at this point.

not if you just never connect the car to wifi except to update it

You just gave them the idea to force an upload of relevant data before downloading non-recall SW versions!

Will this affect people using sexy buttons?

Same shit this shitty CEO did at Twitter.

The page does state it's free (up to $10) for "personal" use. I imagine the majority of these types of users will be rolling open-source self-hosted installs (e.g. Teslamate) or running something like Tessie. The alternative would be for apps like Tessie to record API usage per account and charge additional $ past a fixed amount that the monthly sub covers. That probably isn't ideal for either party. Feels like the Reddit API changes all over again.

What is api

The reason you don't have an Apple Watch app is... because buyers don't choose not to buy a Tesla because of a missing Apple Watch app. Priority is given to revenue generating projects, like blocking API access. An Apple watch app literally costs Tesla more at every avenue. Development, testing, upkeep, API calls, support, etc.

RIP

Tech debt

Depending on how you define tech debt, absolutely.

I had to take my Tesla off my wifi because it was uploading TERABYTES per month on my Xfinity, costing me overages each month. My ISP bandwidth all to train their FSD for free. Bullshit.

Fleet API is the name for their official API.

Will this be enough for daily use for a single individual? 10$ will be around 1.5 million requests a month. Not sure what is the polling rate of teslamate honestly

I agree but is any other company providing data for free?

What if someone were to develop a hardware dongle that collects data from the vehicle bus and freely dispenses it to other apps? The data seems pretty readily available.

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This is ridiculous especially if you are also paying for premium connectivity. It's my car, it's data that I'm generating and for some reason Tesla can charge me for it? They need to provide the option to stream the data the car is outputting to our own servers so we can store and process it without having to pay for it. At this point I should just disconnect my Tesla from my wifi and force Tesla to use the data connection I already paid for to upload their self driving data and other vehicles logs instead of them using my bandwidth. Trying to squeeze every little bit out of the end user is scummy.

How will this affect STATS app?

Already exists. You can already buy a CAN adapter to tap into the vehicle bus and then plug a Bluetooth OBD adapter into it like an OBDLINK. Apps like "Scan my Tesla" can read that data. It's pretty sweet all that you can see with it like battery cell data, coolant temps, etc.

45GB of data per year? Was there a reason to pull data any 5 seconds? No wonder they changed the API policy, the cost for Tesla would have been enormous

It sounds like Tesla is either trying for a money grab or just reduce usage of servers and the in car SIM, not a part for usage concept. If Tesla were to add software to the car that would ping you on any user action (start driving, start or stop charging) then you could likely reduce the frequent calls to driving time and L3 charging, reducing by maybe 99% the API usage while idle? Also why did Tesla delete the ability for you to get information about autopilot usage? Are they trying to stop 3rd parties from figuring out real world usage of FSD and actual disengagement rates? Could this API change be designed to stop you figuring out fleet data statistics like that?

Imagine those people who tried to tether their car to their mobile phones just for something simple like streaming music, then seeing the amount of data transferred in the first month!

What, you're going to instead buy another EV which has no API at all? ?????

Going to make a wild guess that with the significant increase in cost Tessie will need significant pricing or usage changes

I don’t know if we read the same page but from what I see listed it clearly says the $10 discount would cover 100 commands and 2 wakes per day for 2 vehicles. That’s completely adequate for me and hence why I said finally. If that doesn’t work for you all then really, to each their own. I don’t need to send 30 rpm so that use case literally doesn’t apply to me, what they’ve outlined does. I’m sorry if that upsets everyone else.

It means we'll need to move off of Tesla's web API and to direct car communication (over IP and BLE). Tesla has recently introduced firmware improvements which will allow this. It's not on all cars yet but hopefully will be within the next few months. Since those are low/no cost methods, hopefully I can migrate everyone with little to no impact on functionality or price. That's the best case scenario that I'm shooting for. There is a *wild* amount of effort required but I'm dead set on making it work.

Doomed like all the others, or they need to not track real time data and work on what they can based on the car data every hour or so to make it a where viable,

IF they would implement that (doubt it), Tesla would share revenue with owners. So that's not a valid argument.

I’ve been saying this for years. Only I’ve been saying it about ISPs that have data caps but also happily sell you IPTV like YoutubeTV. You pay for your internet service. You have data caps. You use data caps to pay for IPTV that goes against your data cap. It’s like they want to double and sometimes triple dip in profits while kicking you in the teeth. I hate modern life.

I’m glad we all learned from that example and left Reddit…oh wait.

Tesla first communicated that the Owner’s API was being deprecated this time last year, and officially “deprecated it” in Q1. Since then, all third-parties have been on Fleet API for several months now. As such, Tesla will requiee that everyone, including open source projects, utilize the new system. If you’re not using a project commercially, than you’ll use a personal access token which comes with $10 of credit a month.

That’s what I don’t understand. I’m an individual owner, I still use the owner API since I didn’t do any change in my self hosted teslamate instance since more than two years. The only official communication I saw up until now was regarding the fleet users and API changes for them so I’m not sure we can affirm confidently anything here.

This is incorrect. The Fleet API has been intended for commercial products to provide services for vehicle owners to manage their vehicles. This launched in January this year, and has been required since around March when Tesla killed off sending commands via the Owners API and is expected to deprecate the rest any moment. Tesla first launched a free Open Source token option a few months ago for use on self-hosted and managed apps or services, however that was removed today and replaced with the Personal account token, which comes with $10 of credit each month.

The Fleet API has been available for eleven months now, which at any time allowed for the building of a dashboard to control your Tesla products. The only change today is that Tesla has finally announced pricing, which has flabbergasted the entire developer community, who was expecting tiered pricing based on previous hints such as limits on max fields allowed with Fleet Telemetry configurations.

If an app switches entirely to using streaming signals / Fleet Telemetry, with very limited usage of requests (necessary to get vehicle configuration, release notes, etc), and keeps their command usage to 100 times a month, it’d still be fairly challenging to keep costs to under $10 a month per vehicle. 9 out of 10 third-party apps charge less than $5/vehicle, and at least half charge per Tesla Account, such as my own ($3/account on Teslascope), so this will call for 5x price increases and even then have to implement caps which can result in feature pausing if a vehicle drives or charges too frequently. Also a thing of the past for the majority of third-parties that haven’t entitely shut down by January: - Automatic checking for new vehicles on an account to detect deliveries so you can log your first drive. - Full freedom to command scheduling and automations. - Software-related metrics and knowing pending installs isn’t feasible anymore (requires 300x more expensive API requests) - A ton more I’m lacking the emotional bandwidth to think of right now.

Damn I'm guessing the days of making $10 a week in passive income from DIMO are done ..

What amount the older gen cars that don't work with the ble stuff?

Not quite BLE but older cars (legacy Model S/X) will be getting new data tech. Coming soon.

Is there any news on when this comes into force or what is happening to existing accounts? I hope there is going to be a dashboard where you can see current spend and set price caps. I self host and I don't want to wake up to Home Assistant's integration having gone mad and cost me 50k overnight.

Seriously this move pissed me off too. They have the audacity to charge for the megabytes data that we generate and at the same time use our bandwidth to send back gigabytes driving data and footage to improve FSD. Looks like they are trying to extract value out of every possible thing to support their super inflated stock valuation. It's sad to see them go down this route.

And yet Tesla has the audacity to send gigabytes of data from our cars through our Wi-Fi networks to train FSD and other data collection. It's become a one-way road with Tesla and they just want to extract as much value out of everything. Getting access to our data should be free, and if it's too much for their servers to store, give me the option to stream my data to my own server. It's ridiculous that they are charging me for data that I generate.

\> Automatic checking for new vehicles on an account to detect deliveries so you can log your first drive. The only charged API endpoints according to the docs are: all commands, wake, vehicle\_data and nearby\_charging\_sites. All other endpoints, including list and vehicle (for offline/online) are listed as "This endpoint is not charged." Ofc vehicle\_data is the one you need most, so I get your frustration...

How about giving apple and android the same features. I'm still waiting for UWB support.

Let's see how the EU responds to this.

Oh, that didn't appear to be there initially when we all saw the changes or at least hadn't noticed it! That's interesting and very much good news, especially regarding the vehicle list. Thank you very much!

Does this mean Tessie web is going away?

Damn so my private Teslamate wont work for free anymore, i guess? Just got it to work 😔

I see a way to use own rpi with LTE modem to stream telemetry to your own Home Assistant, but BLE API have to have 1:1 coverage with current one

When Google gets UWB out of alpha, Android can have UWB support. Not Tesla’s fault on this one. https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/core-uwb

Upvote

That's really not as egregious though. They are just bundling the IPTV cost for you while charging you for the service they are providing as well. I don't love it, but I understand that and don't think it's completely inappropriate even if it's too expensive. What Tesla is doing here is literally selling you a car that you own and then selling you having that car that you own and information to a server you own over a network connection that you own (if you are on WiFi) or that you pay them for already (if on premium connectivity). To make matters worse, they are charging a rate of around $1000 per GB which would be like premium connectivity costing around $10k a month. The cable company seems like a saint in comparison and that's saying a lot.

Yeah, I think I will also shut off information sharing in protest. That might honestly be the best way to organize a protest. If a large enough group suddenly stop sharing data that might make them reconsider. It just needs to be publicized enough to make sure they know why.

>FSD not ever living up to the hype It depends on what your expectations for FSD were.

What's BLE? Also this will still work when not in proximity of the car? This is crazy :/

Bluetooth low energy. No.

Just thinking about location, it seems to update latitude and longitude about once per second when driving.

They could still use it.

I'd be amazed if legacy Model S/X are getting anything - do you have a source reference for that new data tech?

Well he did also say over IP..

From Teslamate site. Seems until the owner API is killed. When Tesla Fleet API and Telemetry API are needed By default, TeslaMate uses the “unofficial” Owner API and streaming. Tesla now provides official APIs: the Fleet API and the Telemetry API, which replace the Owner API and streaming respectively. But come with limitations and drawbacks.

Maybe you can make it up on volume? /s this sucks :-(

I’m so so pissed off. Not only because I’m a developer actually building an app around my Tesla, but more as a customer, I truly love all third party apps, it adds so much fun to the Tesla experience compare to others! I expected all my future cars to be Teslas, I won’t say not having a nerd data app anymore to check all my stats will make it definitely change but still counts a lot. Especially regarding the mindset of the company. Not a good signal to me. Tesla is famous also thanks to its awesome community. Like Minecraft, Garry’s mod or whatever is popular and cool to play with thanks to the fans out there. Very sad. Edit: typo

Does anyone know if this impacts the S3XY knob?

What and why they something?

I didn’t leave Reddit but I no longer use an app. I’m browser only on old.reddit.

I didn’t leave Reddit, but I definitely didn’t cave in and started using their app. I’m still using Apollo. Another side effect from that whole ordeal is that I stopped moderating, so a plus?

Mostly no. The knob/buttons/stalks communicate via commander, not the api

You mean providing our data for free? I'm happy to pay a reasonable fee for access though.  $10/mo translates to tens of thousands of requests being handled on AWS hosted services

Yeah even though it’s “deprecated”, I continue to use the owner’s API with home assistant; it still works for commands

Personally I never used third party Reddit apps-- always just the desktop old.reddit, even on mobile. But I do use a third party Tesla app to track drives and charging sessions/costs. While I don't think this will push me to ditch Tesla entirely, it definitely sucks more for my own use case.

What other EVs have the same amount of data available via API, and don't charge for it?

I wouldn't want to share it. I would want all of it, given it's 100% my compute, electric, and bandwidth they're using.

If i can't automate heating and defrosting my car via home assistant without stupid pricing it will play a very big part in deciding if ever to get a tesla again its one of the main reasons I got one.

Well, he did say "keep me in the ecosystem." If no manufacturer provides data for free, then they're all functionally equivalent in that regard, and it's no longer a reason to avoid a Ford or Rivian or what have you.

It's stupid I will not be buying another tesla without 3rd party access to the car like home assistant. I'm glad I ditched powerwall for a fully local system.

If they all have effectively no API access (exhorbitantly priced API is functionally equivalent to no API), then what does it matter? There are specific advantages to owning a Tesla over other EVs which are slowly being eroded.

The egregious part of this is that they DO have a system that will send data directly from the car to a third party without involving Tesla's servers. They charge around $1000/GB for the service.

The personal allowance is about 1/10 of what Tessie needs. The API is so freaking expensive that just Tessie's level of data would be $100+ per month per vehicle.

Tesla does still have API access, though. You can load up a local server to fit your needs (which there'll surely be packages for, like there are now). Alternatives don't at all (which apparently if this was important enough to not buy Tesla would be a deal breaker).

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>They were exactly what Elon himself said for years. With that as a yardstick, it's definitely not living up the type There's a difference between goals and reality. In fact, Elon Musk was not the only automaker CEO who predicted their cars would be fully autonomous by 2020, 2022, 2023... and so-on. Many auto CEOs made the same claims. Tesla is the only one shipping a product you can buy and improving it with the goal of being fully autonomous.

This is some great community involvemen to for app dev. Good stuff.

So could this get around the API costs? Seems like an easy sell for people who want all the data.

They have that already, but it requires you own a domain, have internet accessible infrastructure, and generate and install certificates.

My TeslaMate instances have all of that, so, it's just a matter of (if they let us) telling the car to feed TeslaMate directly

Good. Your app price is a rip off anyway.

Probably as easy as creating the free personal account, registering an “app” with machine to machine access to get the credentials, then configuring TeslaMate with those credentials. If you don’t add a payment card, it is limited to the personal credit of $10. Might be harder if we have to set up the Fleet Telemetry portion.

Thank you. I had wondered if the price of products was related to the amount the creator is charged to produce them. However, I now understand that these two factors are not connected.

You can toggle off data sharing and “forget” your home WiFi. In reality though, that just means you’ll probably get firmware updates slower. Only a tiny percentage of people will know or care, so it’s vanishingly unlikely to accomplish much.

Already can do all of that. But the issue is I still have to query data through the fleet API. I want my car to stream data to Tesla and to a server of my choosing.

Yeah it potentially could, the issue is the apps that do this are primary diagnostics tools and don't automatically upload logs or stream data to a server.

Those CAN bus data loggers can show you live data but they don't store and visualize historical data. And the apps connect to the hardware dongles over Bluetooth so it would require additional hardware (like a raspberry pi computer) to log the data, store it, and then transmit it over the Internet using a 4G dongle

Ok great go set up your own distributed compute business with millions of gpus, infrastructure, client management and acquisition then.

I get that it doesn’t work as is, just saying the opportunity is there for the community to give Tesla the middle finger and develop their own solutions instead of using their api.

do you happen to know where to find documentation for the ble/IP APIs? I've been looking but haven't found anything official yet

Agreed. Tinkerers will come up with clever solutions to stream and store data directly from the car. Can't wait to see what projects pop up on GitHub as a result of this. Unfortunately, it will be harder for the less technically inclined to see historical data about their cars, unless Tesla starts offering its own previous trip experience in their app.

Yah we fked

Everything will be gone

How can we charge Tesla for access to our data? They just get it for free.

Really? Are they sharing the income from the data they are already collecting?

Really? Yes? This idea was floated by elon in an earnings call and in the very same earnings call he mentioned that people would be compensated if this idea would ever come to fruition. That's literally what he said.

Reddit allows the same thing.

Same story here! Apollo side loaded is the only reason I’m using this site.

What does this mean for Lifetime Tessie owners? I remember when the API first came out and costs were going to be absorbed. But if the cost is outrageous to maintain, is a refund possible?

From reading their other comments it looks like the hope is to transition to a hybrid model to reduce api calls, so the phone would get car info either via IP direct over WiFi when at home or via Bluetooth when driving or nearby. Only utilizing official api when the car doesn’t have WiFi and isn’t near your phone. Guessing that there would be a goal there of getting api charges below the monthly rate charged to customers in order to actually get things viable/profitable. Only time and testing will tell if it’s possible to actually get down to that amount of usage

how do you self host?

Lots of cars can be connected to Home Assistant either through official or unofficial APIs.

While we understand that… it’s 3 man days work to create a watch app using the existing app. It’s a matter of creating a new app view… There is no excuse. APIs calls won’t be anymore than someone pulling their phone out.

If there's no excuse and my points aren't valid, why haven't they released a watch app yet?

For the same reason they have only just created multiple schedules for charging in the app… they are incapable Of admitting they might be wrong or that users/owners have better ideas. Rain sensors. Awful climate control design ( worse than before ) Messy music app Various other stuff. This is not always the case I like to think they actually used my idea to like the left scroll wheel to the wipers after the button press. Actually makes it usable now…. All credit. They went further to add a lot more to the wheel. Screwing over small developers who have CHAMPIONED Tesla for years with api call pricing is horrific. They are $1.04 Trillion company…. There is no excuse.

Just two thoughts: Will this be the end for a "Not Tesla" Apple watch app. Since a lot of people are using open source EVCC software on a raspberry pi and this software is communicating with Teslas via WiFi or the charge plug. (evcc is an energy management system with a focus on electromobility. The software controls your [EV charger or smart plug](https://evcc.io/en/#devices). It communicates with your [vehicle, inverter or home storage](https://evcc.io/en/#devices) to make intelligent charging decisions. The software is open source and community-driven.) Will there by drawbacks as well or will it not be affected because of the WiFi/charging protocol connection used?

By direct-to-car over IP, are you talking about telemetry API? Or is even that not cheap enough and there are alternate methods?

Thanks for the insightful reply. I was a little hopeful since I have *one* car and run a self hosted Teslamate with zero automations that the $10 would cover me without issue - I'm starting to lose faith the more reading I'm doing. It also seems like a nightmare to set up the additional streaming server. I really feel for the community at large here. While I do sort of understand Tesla starting to charge for some of these services, the pricing seems absolutely ludicrous the more I look in to what the numbers actually represent.

There's a reason that Teslamate hadn't implemented Fleet Telemetry yet (also, wrote a more technical breakdown here: [https://x.com/teslascope/status/1862269808546652350](https://x.com/teslascope/status/1862269808546652350) ) because of the complexity and lack of complete data parity with the vehicle\_data Fleet API endpoint. The paid Teslamate service offered Fleet Telemetry, but this similarly impacts them and assumes they need to modify their costs. The developer of Teslemetry has shared in this thread that just the Fleet Telemetry costs alone would be 25x their current revenue. We're all 1000% on board with Tesla charging for access, and they should! But it has to be reasonable enough not to halt innovation in its tracks. ~~And not risk bankrupting dozens of companies.~~

A "Not Tesla" Apple watch will still be somewhat viable with a massive consideration: It would require utilizing methods that Tesla might deem reverse-engineering (especially as it could bypass paid measures), so the developer would risk being blocked from any future usage of Tesla's official offerings. If Tesla were to patch said methods, the risk is having no options for obvious reasons, which is something other than what I would recommend. I don't foresee any impacts to the Wifi interactions with energy products.

We've seen many other comments like this. To be fair, as long as you're not sending commands like crazy, you should have enough if that's your sole usage (to heat or defrost the car via a button), but still have to monitor it closely.

This comes into force on January 1st, and after that date, you will need a payment method present on the account to allow for continued usage after the $10 monthly credit is depleted (if on a personal app/account). If you're a developer, you'll need to be already considering that vehicle costs will be immediate, so you will need to consider charging upfront and/or setting request caps per vehicle to avoid financial ruin.

Some open-source projects like Teslamate let you self-host a data recording program on your computer, but it does not yet utilize Fleet Telemetry. Hence, a significant update is needed before working after January 1st. Otherwise, logging will cease to work after about 3-4 hours until the following month.

It'll be fascinating to see how their unique model works following these changes, as costs per vehicle can be very substantial.

No other manufacturer will do it in US. Until Chinese EVs can come in Tesla is the only one.

I already do that since Tesla doesn't support opening a browser to connect to my apartment's wifi. I just use my phone as a hotspot to update it.

I’d literally build it for them for free

Um, if I build millions of compute notes, and then sell those nodes to others, they’re no longer my nodes. Which is what Tesla has done here. It’s *my* node now.

Has anyone asked Tesla for their car data? What did you get? Any chance to get full telemetry (speed, location, etc.)?

Interesting. I actually have a raspberry pi zero 2w installed in my car and always on. It is providing WiFi to the car and running a Tesla BLE to MQTT bridge which allows me to wake the vehicle remotely over internet (I have a US Tesla in Europe so the normal wake over SMS doesn’t work). This setup might be the new way for things like Tessie, TeslaFi, and TeslaMate to work.

When will this be effective ? Should I already disable Teslamate ??

What car will you be switching to that you can do this on then?

Here we are, the great startup spirit is gone. "we give you all software the hardware can handle". Now Tesla are paywalls on wheels. Don't be surprised when they'll announce you have to **watch an Ad before you drive** or that you **have to login using an X account to use your car**...

I have no idea why Elon despises public APIs this much. First he kills Twitter API with absurd pricing, now does the same to Tesla.

And very similar to the FKA Twitter API pricing

Will API-based access continue for folks who purchased lifetime after the price increases?

Tesla is generally trying to phase out some things for newer technologies (and charging a lot for it as an incentive to change). Which combination of tech a specific car uses will be based on model and firmware since they all support different things.

What’s the deal with Tessie soliciting lifetime memberships via email today when the fate of the app is in question?

I've been working on the new architecture since May 2023 (like I said, a *lot* of work) and some cars are already using it. The fate of the app isn't in question. Some edge cases to address but everything works pretty well and is *extremely* cheaper.

Thanks for clarifying.

Rivian?

lol. the only reason you got the car was for automation and api access? Is there another vehicle on the market that's currently offers what they're taking away?

This is best comment. Upvote for you sir/ma'am.

So if I understand correctly, Tesla is moving away from a costly API scheme for them but does offer an alternative? Sucks to have to do this but at least there is an alternative…

There is some BLE code examples in Tesla’s vehicle-command repository, however the “IP” methodology is entirely reverse-engineering and don’t expect any documentation to be made available anytime soon. It has a good chance of Tesla patching it + violates their terms (which is why he referred to it as “no cost”.

Tesla has not moved away from anything. The previous communication was hinted at paid tiers, with specific access to features depending on the tiers. Tesla ditched this entirely and is offering one very expensive API, and another that is still not very viable for most developers. There are no other official alternatives.

Tell me you don't work in IT or software development without telling me 😉 No company in their right mind would ship production software using alpha code. You could just buy an iPhone 😉

I just set up HomeAssistant and the ~~Tesla~~ Tessie integration is amazing. I have my HVAC turn on when I start navigating home, the garage door open when I’m home and open the car door, etc. I’d hate to lose those things but if I can get a “personal” use free API key I’d be fine. Same thing with the Google calendar and travel time APIs.

This makes me reconsider getting another tesla in the future

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Until they start charging to do this as well. It's fairly easy for them to lock local API behind a paywall.

No need to worry for now. Tesla won't charge you by surprise.

Would be reasonable that at LEAST anyone with FSD get free API. We do feed Tesla a huge amount of valuable data. Will never happen though.

sand voracious rhythm pen vegetable spoon gaze market nutty racial *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev/home)*

Why would I use Tessie if it only works when I'm near my car?

Yeah this might be the nail in the coffin for me in looking to buy a new M3. I’m between M3P and Polestar 4 and the MAIN reason I wanted the Tesla was integration with HomeAssistant and because I’ve paid for TezLab lifetime… if they make it so I can’t do that then I’ll go for more “luxury” feeling car that also doesn’t have API access

https://i.imgur.com/RXEIlWo.jpeg

There's some basic read only access available for Polestar, which someone has plugged into Home Assistant [https://github.com/pypolestar/polestar\_api](https://github.com/pypolestar/polestar_api)

Or, they switch to using the alternative options Tesla allows for communication that are much less expensive. The developer has been working on the transition for nearly 2 years, so it's not like this was just dropped on them by surprise.

I’m not super deep on this topic but considering this was posted by the Tessie dev and the general consensus is that for essentially all use cases this is orders of magnitude more expensive I think it’d safe to say changes will likely be made to either pricing or service

Direct communication with the car (the alternative option I was referencing) is significantly cheaper for app developers, it's just requiring current app developers to change how they gather data and is requiring re-writing code. But again, the direct communication with the car is *significantly cheaper*. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1h1luq5/tesla_announces_third_party_api_pricing/lzdnyam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1h1luq5/tesla_announces_third_party_api_pricing/lzm43hi/

Ha

Quick turnaround!

Thanks - I'd seen something before in my research but the MAIN thing I want is to be able to precondition and stuff like that when something happens in the house. Read-only not good enough for that... Shame really!

As a fellow software dev: oh god

Good news for you. They made one.

My fiber connection has no data cap

Same but others aren’t so lucky. But consider the fact that in the past you had a dedicated line for cable tv and a dedicated line for internet. Now you use your internet to watch your IPTV (YouTube tv etc) while simultaneously paying them for the service.

Fair point

I recently bought 5 lifetime licenses for the app, and I absolutely love it! It’s a fantastic app. Don’t let the haters bring you down. The only thing I’d like to see is the ability to share a car. Right now, I can’t share my license with my family, so I can’t share the Tessie love with them. It would be great if I could share a car with my family members, so we can all have our own accounts. I also think it would save you some money in API calls if you could share specific vehicles with multiple family members. Right now, I share my login with 5+ family members, which results in a lot of wakes and API calls for cars that they’re not using.

Maybe Tesla will also pay us for the power used while the FSD data is being uploaded?

True and the interface is mostly Bluetooth but they do some network calls to update the center display to match what the user selected using the S3xy hardware. I can live without these display updates but I sure like the heads-up display which I believe reads all data over Bluetooth (no network API calls involved); likewise, they run a local Wifi server on the S3XY commander that reads all the data required by Scan My Tesla.

A little late commenting here, but I am puzzled as to how/why some older vehicles are still able to use the Tesla unsupported Owner API. Soon after they had announced that API would stop working, my code (hosted online on a personal site) ceased to work. But, a few months later I tried my site and everything was working as before. After some brief searching online, it seems like this is true for some older vehicles and users. While I am happy that is the case, I am wondering if there is a reason or explanation for this. I might create a new post in the sub to try and get more visibility to this. But, is anyone else seeing this? Any thoughts??

So you're using pi zero as a hotspot? but where is the Pi zero getting internet from?

It has a usb lte modem

So have all the third-party apps stopped working now?

You should create a blogpost about your new architecture, I'd be quite interested. Are you using Kafka to ingest this scale of data? Where are you storing all this data? Is it just on postgres or are you using Redshift or something?

Watch or phone app. I presume I use it all the time, as that's how my smart devices presently connect. Though may also unfortunately explain why it doesn't connect as consistent as it did before 😟

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Hi! Here’s an interesting link to a highly functional API that enables direct communication with vehicles in a more secure way, without driving up costs. If you’d like more details or want to join the waiting list, just click here: [https://www.apitesla.com/

Hi! Here’s an interesting link to a highly functional API that enables direct communication with vehicles in a more secure way, without driving up costs. If you’d like more details or want to join the waiting list, just click here: [https://www.apitesla.com/