More than a year ago, Tesla began distributing documentation for working with its proprietary application programming interface (API) to third-party mobile application developers, but pricing for access to this ecosystem only recently became available. Some developers have calculated that they will have to give $60 million a year to Tesla and ultimately bury the business.
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Tesla not only has a multimillion-dollar fleet of electric vehicles from which it collects various information, but also a highly developed network of charging stations in certain regions of the planet. You can monetize related data by providing access to it to developers of various service and information applications. Companies operating a fleet of Tesla electric vehicles can also create their own software tools to control costs and manage corporate fleets. Developers of third-party applications will have to pay for access to the proprietary software interface.
At first glance, the profile section of the Tesla website contains fairly harmless prices. To receive 150,000 streaming signals you will have to pay $1, the same amount will cost sending 1000 commands to the on-board electronics of an electric vehicle, 500 data requests or 50 wake-up commands cost the same.
According to Electrek, citing the developers of the Tessie app, which boasts an audience of approximately 400,000 Tesla electric vehicle owners, these seemingly innocuous API fees for specific software will result in annual payments to Tesla in the amount of $60 million. Tessie developers They see an alternative in connecting to their customers’ electric vehicles directly via IP address or via Bluetooth while the smartphone is in the electric vehicle or nearby.
Teslascope developers also consider the proposed prices for API access to be unreasonable, since in the case of their application, payments to Tesla will be 7.5 times higher than monthly revenue. And these are not the worst calculation options, but they can also cast doubt on the very feasibility of doing business under the proposed conditions.
By comparison, Apple charges individual developers $99 per year to access its API, and then charges a fee of about 30% for a number of in-app transactions. Enterprise customers who need apps in the Apple ecosystem for internal use pay $299 in this case. Google is more democratic in this regard: the one-time fee for a developer is $25, but transaction fees can still reach the same 30%. In any case, the variety of applications for the Apple iOS and Google Android platforms suggests that developers are most often satisfied with the terms of cooperation with both companies. Tesla is trying to find some kind of business model in this area, and so far these attempts do not look successful.