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

Fuck Elon. Fuck Tesla.

I was their target demographic and Elon made sure that I never even consider their trash. I went BMW instead.

Similar vibes than Reddit api pricing

Reddit got the idea from Elon's twitter API fees. This is Elon being consistent(ly terrible).

API pricing is such a shitty obnoxious dogshit practice that is now of course becoming standard because of course it is. internet barely costs money come the fuck on make a quality product

It used to be a respected standard for developers and hosts to be somewhat open and friendly to 3rd party devs, because ultimately they're customers and they're helping recruit and retain customers, they should be treated with respect. just because it's innovative and disruptive to invent the machine gun doesn't mean it's good

Something to note: Tesla has two vehicle APIs, the Fleet API for commercial accounts and the Owner API for individuals. This change currently only impacts the Fleet API.

If you are an individual owner who accesses your vehicle data from the Owner API (usually via a self hosted tool like TeslaMate), this does not affect you. Yet.

stop buying tesla, stop supporting spacex, and stop buying starlink

Another reminder to developers to not bother with public APIs, just screen-scrape or reverse-engineer the official app private API.

Its Tesla; y'all should be dumping that shit anyway.

So musk pulled a Reddit spez?

Not surprising as musk is a scammer who got incredibly lucky, always has been.

Fuck spez and fuck musk

I'm surprised devs didn't see the writing on the wall after Twitter all but murdered its API

Reminds me of the Fall Out Boy song “Dead on Arrival”.

When Twitter (and Reddit) pulled this off, I was just mildly pissed. Can't do interesting things with my data, oh no.

...Image that, except it's an expensive luxury car you're no longer allowed to do interesting things with.

One more reason I’m glad I bought a car with CarPlay / Android Auto support.

Hehehe, we all know how that's like. I'm sure this income will truly be used to improve their services and support robust and reliable API infrastructure.

There's no laws against profiteering?

Imagine trying to sell cars and then pulling some shit like this

What’s the data? The article says the app was fleet management? So location and remote opening doors or something?

Tesla can eat penis.

rent seeking strikes back

Duh.

Greed twists all minds.

There goes TeslaFi… fuck. I use that all the time to see my global map and keep track of my stats (like power usage on long drives), and auto enabling of certain features at certain times, like heat/ac after work.

is it really that good

I hate subscription services. And I hate money-grubbing corps. Especially when they try to profit off of your own data.

That said, this is not that as infeasible as it sounds. The dev for Tessie reportedly has 400k users. That’s roughly $12.50/month per user. Modestly speaking, if the dev charged their users $13/mo, he’d profit $2.4 million per year. For $15/mo, he would profit $12 million per year.

That’s probably what Tesla is hoping their devs would do. And I’m sure a lot of Tesla owners could afford the fee.