Tesla releases API pricing, dev says would cost $60 million per year to run his 3rd-party app

Tesla has released API pricing for third-party apps and this developer says that it would cost them $60 million per year to run their third-party Tesla app under these new pricing.

After years of operating in a gray zone without an official API, which is an interface to communicate with a service, Tesla third-party apps finally got official API documentation late last year.

It is currently geared toward fleet management, but developers hoped it would be the first step toward creating a healthy Tesla third-party app ecosystem.

Today, Tesla has released usage pricing for its Fleet API, and it is shocking many app developers:

Tesla included a cost estimation calculator based on different signals, commands, and data needs.

It doesn’t mean much to me, but the developer of the Tessie app, a third-party Tesla analytics and automation app, used it and said on Reddit that it would cost about $60 million in API fees to run his app under this pricing model:

“I’ll owe Tesla around $60 million per year using current rate.”

That’s with 400,000 Tesla drivers reportedly using the app.

Obviously, that’s not a sustainable pricing environment, but fortunately, the developer says that he can get around it by dropping the API and using “direct car communication over IP and BLE.”

Tesla has also been releasing its own fleet management features lately, which could explain this move, which throws some cold water on third-party apps.

Tyler Corsair, the founder of Teslascope, another Tesla third-party app, added that their new API cost would add up to about 7.5 times the app’s monthly revenue. According to some other devs, they are not even amongst the worst positioned.

Electrek’s Take

This is reminiscent of a situation Reddit had last year when it also updated its API pricing, which resulted in killing some popular third-party apps that had become more popular than Reddit’s own mobile app.

It’s sad to see Tesla going that way.

It will likely kill some useful third-party apps. Fortunately, it does sound like some will be able to work around it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some give up amid what can be perceived as an hostile move from Tesla toward third-party apps.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

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