What is it
Your Tesla. Your data. Your server.
TeslaMate is a free, open-source data logger that records every drive, charge, and vehicle state your Tesla reports — permanently, privately, and on hardware you control.
Written September 2026, against TeslaMate 4.2.0 on Ubuntu 24.04. TeslaMate moves quickly and this page does not — before following anything here step by step, check docs.teslamate.org for what is current.
License
Free & open
Data location
100% yours
Typical cost
~$5–6/mo
History kept
Forever
Why run it
Everything your car remembers — kept longer than it does
Tesla's own app shows you the last handful of trips before older ones quietly disappear. TeslaMate keeps all of it — drive by drive, charge by charge, forever — in a database that lives on hardware you own or rent, not inside a company's cloud you don't control.
It runs quietly in the background, waking only when your car does, so it adds no meaningful extra drain to the battery. Everything it collects becomes searchable, chartable history: how your battery is aging, what a specific trip actually cost in energy, or exactly where the car has been parked over the last three years.
It's your car. It should be your data too.
What you get
- High-precision drive & charge history, kept indefinitely
- No added vampire drain — the car sleeps normally
- Automatic address lookup for every stop
- Geo-fencing for custom named locations
- Charge cost tracking, down to the session
- Battery degradation tracked over the life of the car
- Home Assistant & Node-RED integration via MQTT
- Supports multiple vehicles on one account
- Light, dark, or system-matched dashboard themes
What you'll see
Dashboards built from your own history
A live status view, plus nearly two dozen pre-built Grafana dashboards covering drives, charges, efficiency, and long-term battery health.
Every dashboard is a Grafana page you can open, filter by date, and drill into — or edit, if you want something the project doesn't ship. Nothing is locked; the queries run against your own Postgres database. If you want to see more of them, the project publishes a full gallery at docs.teslamate.org/docs/screenshots.
Live Status, Drive Detail and Battery Health are courtesy of the official TeslaMate project (github.com/teslamate-org/teslamate) and show its metric demo data. The Charging view and the dashboard list are from a live personal instance.
For a full list of TeslaMate screenshots, see docs.teslamate.org/docs/screenshots.
What you need
Modest requirements, two ways to host it
TeslaMate is a lightweight workload — it doesn't need powerful hardware, just something that stays on.
- 1 vCPU minimum
- 1–2 GB RAM
- 25 GB storage, grows slowly
- Docker & Docker Compose
- A domain name, for HTTPS
- 24/7 uptime
Cloud hosting
- Rent a small virtual server (e.g. Vultr) for roughly $5–6/month, all-in
- The provider handles power, networking, and physical hardware
- Reachable from anywhere the moment it's deployed
- Best starting point if you don't already have always-on hardware at home
Local hosting
- Run it on a spare computer, Mac Mini, or small Linux box at home
- You take on what a cloud provider normally handles: a reachable IP, port forwarding, and uptime
- Little to no recurring bill beyond a few dollars a month in electricity
- A good fit if you already have suitable hardware sitting idle
What it costs
Cloud vs. home: the real monthly numbers
Cloud hosting bundles everything into one predictable bill. Home hosting trades that bill for a small amount of electricity — plus whatever the hardware itself cost, if you don't already own something suitable.
Cloud (Vultr, all-in)
$5–6 / month
Home electricity (typical)
$0.50–1.30 / mo
| Device | Typical idle draw | Est. electricity / mo | Approx. hardware cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) | ~4 W | ~$0.52 | $100–120 new kit |
| Mac Mini (Apple Silicon) | ~7 W | ~$0.91 | $0 if repurposed, $499+ new |
| Generic mini PC (Intel N100-class) | ~10 W | ~$1.30 | $150–200 new, less if used |
Electricity estimates use the U.S. national average residential rate of 18.4¢/kWh (EIA, August 2026) with each device running 24/7. Idle power draw comes from public third-party measurements and varies by model, OS, and configuration — treat these as ballpark, not a guarantee for your exact hardware. Hardware costs are rounded market estimates, not quotes, and don't include your own time to set up and maintain the machine, which cloud hosting mostly removes from the equation.
Another option
Prefer not to run a server at all?
Don't want to get a domain name, find a cloud provider, configure a server, and manage the care and feeding of your own TeslaMate environment? A managed service can run TeslaMate for you in a shared environment for a low monthly fee.
MyTeslaMate — $5.80/mo (or $4.35/mo paid annually)
The same open-source TeslaMate, run for you. myteslamate.com — a good fit if you don't want a dedicated system, at home or in the cloud, running around the clock just to collect your Tesla's data via its API.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| TeslaFi.com | $8/mo or $80/yr |
| Tessie.com | $6.99/mo or $69.99/yr or $199.99 lifetime |
| TezLabApp.com | $5.99/mo or $49.99/yr |
| Teslascope.com | $3.99 to $6.99/mo |
These are commercial, hosted alternatives to self-hosting TeslaMate — convenient if you'd rather pay a subscription than run infrastructure, though (unlike TeslaMate) your data lives on their servers rather than yours. Teslascope's higher tier is the closest equivalent to what TeslaMate gives you. Pricing reviewed August 29, 2026, and may change — check each provider's site for current rates.
Where to start
From zero to a working install
The official documentation covers the software itself. My own three documents cover everything around it — picking a host, wiring up a domain and HTTPS, and keeping it running afterwards.
From the TeslaMate project
- docs.teslamate.orgOfficial documentation
- github.com/teslamate-org/teslamateSource code & community
- docs.teslamate.org/docs/screenshotsMore TeslaMate graphs and dashboard views
From me
The following three documents are mine, not the project's. The brochure, the Install Guide, and Supporting TeslaMate are my own interpretation, written from experience installing and supporting my own instance. They are not official TeslaMate documentation and have not been reviewed or endorsed by the project — for the authoritative reference, start at docs.teslamate.org.
- TeslaMate BrochureEssentially this page in print form — the same material, laid out to print or email PDF
- TeslaMate Install GuideFull setup walkthrough, cloud or local, start to finish PDF
- Supporting TeslaMateBackups, updates & ongoing maintenance PDF