Tesla API pricing could destroy many third party apps

Tesla's API pricing is live, and the news is not good for third party app developers.

On Thursday, the company revealed third party API pricing, which varies related to the type of data the app requires. Streaming vehicle signals to the app, for example, cost $1 per 150,000 signals; performing commands on a Tesla device costs $1 per 1,000 requests; polling a limited set of data from the vehicle costs $1 per 500 requests, and waking up the vehicle from sleep costs $1 per 50 requests.

Tesla got an official API (application programming interface) in October 2023 after years of developers having to rely on an unofficial API. But access was free — until now.

This can be hard to put into perspective if you're a regular user, but for some third-party app developers, these prices are a deal breaker. On Reddit (via Electrek), the developer of popular third-party app Tessie said it would cost them $60 million per year to keep operating at current API pricing rates.

Tessie is an app that offers a comprehensive set of information on your Tesla car, such as real-world range, battery health, and charging times. It also allows the user to perform certain commands on the car. According to the developer, Tessie makes an API call to a car every 30 seconds when the car is "awake and busy."

"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."

Tessie is a paid app, but these costs are obviously unsustainable. The Tessie developer said they plan to circumvent this by using "direct car communication over IP and BLE," which will require a "wild amount of effort."

Tyler Corsair, founder of another popular Tesla app Teslascope, also voiced his opinion in the same Reddit thread. "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."

And the developer of another third party app, Teslemetry, said it would cost him "25x revenue at this point."

Tesla does not provide a way for the media to send inquiries, so we can't ask about the reasoning behind these rates. If nothing changes, however, it appears that a lot of third-party apps are going out of business.

With this move, Tesla appears to be going the same path as X (ex-Twitter), and Reddit, which put a lot of developers out of business when they drastically increased API pricing for third party apps.