The Future of Teslascope

How we intend to handle mandatory changes, and its potential impacts to you.

Tesla has officially announced their pricing for developer API access. These changes have a significant impact on third-party services such as Teslascope. We'll break down everything in greater detail below, including changes to our premium subscription.

Fleet APIs and Tesla's Pricing

In January 2024, Tesla officially launched their Fleet APIs, replacing the "Owners API" previously used by third-party apps and services to interact with Tesla vehicles and accounts. This update introduced a wealth of significant improvements, including enhanced account security and granular control over app access.

Alongside this transition, Tesla announced plans to charge for API access and vehicle interactions later in the year. Their website outlined subscription tiers, suggesting a fixed cost per vehicle (e.g., $1/vehicle/month), which developers would need to pass on to their users. However, Tesla later revealed that they would adopt a usage-based pricing model instead:

• Vehicle Data: $0.002 per request
• Streaming Data: $0.0001 per signal (data point)
• Vehicle Commands: $0.001 each

Teslascope interacts with your vehicles through two primary methods: the Fleet API and Fleet Telemetry. Historically, 99.9% of Teslascope's requests relied on the Fleet API, which is largely modeled after the same framework Tesla has used in its mobile app for over six years. Fleet Telemetry, a new streaming-based implementation, was introduced only about six months ago.

Impacts to Teslascope

With the new pricing, continuing to use vehicle data requests would cost Teslascope between 7.5 and 120.5 times its current monthly revenue. To remain sustainable, we must immediately transition to relying solely on Fleet Telemetry.

Teslascope has always prided itself on being the most affordable third-party service, offering subscriptions at just $3.00 per month regardless of the number of vehicles you own. This was achievable thanks to efficient code and our small team— just me and my fiancée. and a fox 🦊

Unfortunately, Tesla's new API pricing makes this model unsustainable. As a result, we will need to introduce changes to our subscription pricing without delay.

Subscription Changes

Starting on February 1st, 2025, we will switch to a new pricing model that is per vehicle instead of per Tesla Account. With this change, we will be increasing the starting cost to $3.99/month/vehicle. This is the first price increase since we launched over five years ago.

Existing subscriptions will automatically switch to the new model on their next renewal date. For existing annual subscriptions, you will be charged depending on your renewal date. We will happily provide refunds upon request.

Two subscription tiers are planned; Plus, and Pro (which is launching in February). These tiers are build in alignment with Tesla's usage-based API costs and designed to match your typical vehicle habits.

These changes are crucial to ensuring the sustainability of our platform. For 80% of our members, this will result in a modest increase of just $0.99 (USD) per month. For accounts with multiple vehicles, vehicles can be upgraded to either the Plus or Pro tiers.

We understand this may lead to a noticeable increase in subscription costs for some members. However, Teslascope remains the most affordable option among comparable services. When compared to business-oriented offerings, our platform remains consistently 55% to 70% more cost-effective.

New Features

Following the transition to the new subscription system, Dark Mode will no longer require a premium subscription. You will also finally be able to associate multiple Tesla Accounts to the one Teslascope account.

For our Pro vehicle subscription, we will be introducing a collection of new features before the end of January, including vehicle alerts (keep track of when issues are detected with your vehicle), automations, supercharger costs + invoice downloading, driver management (invite, add, or delete vehicle access), and auto-delivery detection.

What's Next and Closure

Change can be challenging. As we've shared across our social channels while maintaining transparency, this platform's revenue is our sole source of income. For over five years, I've dedicated myself full-time to maintaining and growing Teslascope, continuously adding new features for everyone (myself included!) to enjoy—without any price increase. 😉

The coming month will demand significant effort to completely overhaul the majority of our vehicle polling systems to transition to Fleet Telemetry. This change is critical, as our current methods are 300x more expensive. With the exception of session tracking, we do not anticipate any limitations on previously paid portions of the platform.

We remain optimistic that Tesla will collaborate with developers to find a mutually beneficial solution that enables us to continue delivering amazing experiences to the over a million vehicle owners who collectively enjoy using apps like Teslascope daily. To be clear, we fully acknowledge and agree that Tesla deserves to be compensated for their work and the use of their infrastructure. However, we believe achieving a balance is essential to avoid completely disrupting this vibrant developer ecosystem.

Teslads

Starting early next year, we will begin displaying limited advertising on specific pages such as our Software Updates. This will be powered by our own in-house platform we've been developing called, Teslads, which will display curated, human-approved products and events relevant to your vehicle. Ads suck, but we hope to make these so good that they don't need to be blocked. ;)

We've built Teslads with a privacy-first approach; no information about you nor your vehicles ever leave this platform. Instead, advertisers can specify which models (including year and trim) or location (limited to states or countries) so that products are curated just for you. Nobody likes to be viewing Full Self-Driving release notes or browsing an article about new superchargers, and see an invasive advertisement for that Dishwasher you were searching for hours ago.

More than ever, Teslads will help us cover the fees we pay Tesla, alongside any infrastructure costs and ensure we can keep Teslascope sustainability and financially viable for a long time.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you have any questions that do not appear below, please feel free to reach out to us via email.