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 December 20th, 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, we will work with you directly to credit your account, or process prorated 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.
Plus
Available Soon
Pro
Available in February
Send commands and control your vehicles with ease, without the Tesla mobile app.
Track your software + navigation updates.
Set up electricity costs with Time of Use and location-based pricing.
Automatically detect frequently visited locations and view their sessions all in one place.
Set vehicle reminders regarding maintenance (or anything), and receive email notifications as the deadline approaches.
View your travels and activities at a glance.
Import data from other third-party services.
(up to twelve months)
Choose a unique vehicle ID when accessing your vehicle's URL, when sharing it with others, and for referrals.
Issues and service alerts detected on your vehicle, such as some hardware failures.
Schedule actions to occur at specific times, days, or locations.
Automatically populates your Supercharger sessions with additional metadata, including cost and an invoice download link.
Manage access to your vehicles, generate invite links, and auto-revoking expiration dates for limited-time access.
Keeps your personal data private when lending your vehicle to a friend, or for use on rental services such as Turo.
Automatically detects newly delivered vehicles for speedier onboarding.
Connect and manage multiple Tesla Accounts and their associated vehicles.
Participate in groups with your friends, co-workers, or local Tesla club. Coordinate events, and compete with vehicle metrics.
Enable our "Full Self-Testing" to experience new features before everyone else.
Whether you're showing off your vehicle(s), profile, or topping the leaderboards, you'll get a nifty badge next to your vehicle for helping support our platform.
Access to our extensive collection of APIs to access and manage your vehicles and Teslascope account.
Access Tesla's Fleet API endpoints via our managed service, without any lengthy setup required.
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.