- Tesla is getting ready to charge third-party developers big bucks to access user’s cars
- Devs say that Tesla’s costs are significantly more than they make from users
- This could wipe some third-party apps out completely
The cat is out of the bag, folks: Tesla is preparing to begin charging software developers to access the Application Programming Interface for its cars—something used by just about every third-party dev that builds software that integrates with Tesla’s vehicles.
We’re not just talking hundreds or even thousands of dollars here. Some developers are potentially looking down the barrel of invoices with multi-million dollar figures on the bottom line—and it’s going to screw over not just the engineers building the software that many drivers know and love, but also the people who the software every single day.
Decoding The Tech Jargon
Before we jump into things, let’s talk about what an API actually is. Essentially, it’s a software bridge that enables two programs to talk with one another in very specific ways. Think of it like a dinner menu for software: it tells you what you can eat without letting you actually poke around in the kitchen while also telling you how to order the food (think: the names of food items on the menu, and restaurant policies like “no substitutions”).
In the Tesla world, APIs create a tunnel between the outside world and your car. If you have the keys, you can give them to a third-party app to authorize it to do common and complex vehicle tasks like open your trunk, document your mileage, or perform automated controls like pre-heating your car’s battery at a certain time before you leave for work every day.
Tons of third-party apps have been built on Tesla’s API. And there’s a good reason for it, too. Tesla’s native phone app is great for basic functions, but it lacks more advanced controls for power users, or people who want to go above and beyond what the Tesla app allows folks to access. Tessie, one of the most popular, provides insight on battery health and charging cost projections, and up until this week, was one of the only ways to put Tesla controls on your wrist with a wearable.
Tesla’s user-facing API has been undocumented for more than a decade—that is, until, Tesla officially released documentation on how to use the API last October. Until then, it was a community effort that began in 2013 and just kind of worked, unofficially.
Astronomical Pricing
Last week, Tesla officially unveiled its pay-per-use pricing for its API. These are the costs that developers will need to pay per vehicle to access data and perform actions for vehicles on its app. And, folks, things aren’t looking great if you use one of the dozens of third-party Tesla apps out there that will be affected in just a matter of weeks.
“I’ll owe Tesla around $60 million per year using current rates,” wrote James Gragg, the founding developer of the popular Tesla app, Tessie, on Reddit.
Gragg told InsideEVs that Tessie has been planning on adapting to the API changes for more than a year, so it’s not something that the dev hasn’t planned for. However, the abrupt change and sky-high pricing make it clear the direction that Gragg and many other devs will have to go if they want to keep their apps active in the Tesla ecosystem.
“[W]e’ll need to move off of Tesla’s web API and to direct car communication [over IP and Bluetooth Low Energy]. 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,” continued Gragg. “There is a wild amount of effort required, but I’m dead set on making it work.”
Effectively, this means removing the real-time access to date from Tesla’s always-connected cloud and instead requiring proximity-based connection to the car. For local IP connection, this means being on the same wireless network, and Bluetooth Low Energy requires that the driver’s phone be physically within reach of the vehicle.
Of course, not all apps will go down this road. As Gragg mentioned, the change takes “a wild amount of effort” to make it work. However, if the only alternatives are millions of dollars in API fees or a non-functional app, it seems that developers will have a tough choice to make sooner rather than later.
“The new API pricing from Tesla came as a shock to the community. Tesla did announce a transition to a paid model at the end of 2023, but the new pricing model is quite prohibitive. In most cases, it would require developers to pay thousands of dollars per day to Tesla, whereas developers make only a fraction of that amount,” said Ramin Nasibov, developer of the Stats App for Tesla, in an email to InsideEVs.
“Most third-party developers are individual, independent developers (I am). There are tens of thousands of Tesla car owners who have come to rely on these third-party apps, which provide the users with features that complement the official Tesla app. We really hope that Tesla reconsiders the API pricing model so that we can continue serving our users.”
Tesla Pulls A Twitter
Photo by: Tesla
In case this cash grab sounds familiar, recall that X—or Twitter, as it was once better known as—did the exact same thing once it came under the ownership of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. This effectively erased some of the most popular third-party Twitter apps from the face of the earth that couldn’t afford monthly bills in the tens of thousands of dollars because of API requests made to the platform.
Reddit soon followed suit. CEO Steve Huffman said that he was inspired by Musk’s strategic move to ratchet up API prices and did the exact same thing to Reddit’s API. Unsurprisingly, popular apps like Apollo bit the dust, at least officially.
This has led to the internet lashing back against the platforms because of the change in user experience. For Reddit, moving from the Apollo app to the official Reddit app meant more ads, less functionality, and more power consumption. For Twitter, apps like Tweetbot were killed, which also meant a less pleasurable experience for users who were instead forced to Twitter’s—sorry, X’s—native app.
With Tesla pulling the same strings as X and Reddit, it’s likely that we’ll see the exact same thing happen. Sure, there’s the risk of paid apps getting kneecapped, but also a much higher hit to the usability of free apps like A Better Route Planner:
“The Tesla data streaming is a technically good solution that enables really good real-time data for users. The pricing for this data method and the way we use it in ABRP would become $4-5 per vehicle and month, which is not possible for us to sustain as a free service to the users,” Bo Lincoln, founder of the app A Better Route Planner (now owned by Rivian), told InsideEVs. “Even with ABRP Premium ($5/month), which is what we typically require for paid telemetry solutions, it would not cover our costs.”
Lincoln explained that ABRP would need to drop Tesla connectivity from ABRP’s free user-facing mapping service due to the API charges. And even if users purchased a premium subscription, the live data would need to limit the quality and frequency of the data pulled in order to ensure that its API bill is manageable.
From a user perspective, this is kind of frustrating. Tesla opening up its API last year finally acknowledged the innovation that third-party developers can bring to Tesla’s already software-rich ecosystem. Hell, it’s even been rumored that the automaker has considered an in-car app store. But financially walling off developers from control of cars is a move that owners should be riled up about.
Tesla shows that it’s planning to give folks a $10 credit for personal API use. Perhaps some apps can allow users to input their own API key to use the software to offload the cost from the developer and still maintain functionality. But the ease of seamless click-and-go integration appears to be over, at least without a huge uptick in price.