Under development. Teslaris is not ready to install yet — sign-in is blocked by a defect on Tesla's side that prevents third-party authorisation. Downloads will appear here once it works end to end.

Your Tesla, in the menu bar

Battery, range and charging status at a glance. A tiny native macOS app — no Electron, no accounts, no subscription.

Free and open source · macOS 13+ · Not affiliated with Tesla

Side view of a Tesla Model 3

Render from Tesla's configurator — the same image the app shows for your car.

Effectively free

Tesla meters Fleet API usage per request, and gives individual developers a $10 monthly discount — enough to cover Teslaris's modest polling, so the practical cost is around zero. Tesla does require a payment method on the app, with a billing limit you set to cap any spend. You bring your own developer application, so there's no shared key and no subscription, and your car's data goes straight from Tesla to your Mac.

5,000/mo
Free credits with every developer account
≈3,000/mo
Typical Teslaris usage
0
Servers between your Mac and Tesla

Small app, sharp focus

Everything you glance at, nothing you don't.

Live, but frugal

Refreshes every 15 minutes when parked. While charging, the cadence scales with time-to-full — down to every minute as the charge finishes. Nothing polls your car to death.

Charging notifications

Charging started, charging complete, charger lost power. Each one can be switched off.

Read-only by design

The only scope requested is vehicle_device_data. Teslaris cannot unlock, wake, or drive your car.

Keychain, not plaintext

Credentials and session tokens live in the macOS Keychain. Nothing is written to disk in the clear.

Never wakes the car

A sleeping Tesla stays asleep — wakes cost credit and battery. You see the last known data, marked as such.

Native and tiny

Pure AppKit, one small binary. No Electron, no SwiftUI, no background services. MIT licensed.

One-time setup

Tesla lets your own devices read your own car — you just have to tell Tesla, once, that this Mac is allowed to ask. That's all the setup is. It's free, it takes about ten minutes, and you never touch it again.

What you need Your Tesla account and about ten minutes. No card, no command line, nothing to cancel later.
What you do Fill in one form on Tesla's own website, then copy two codes from it into Teslaris.
What Teslaris does Everything else — the security keys, the web address they live at, and the registration with Tesla.

The four steps below are short on purpose. Anything fiddly is folded away — open it only if you hit it.

01

Install Teslaris

Once builds are available, you'll drag Teslaris into Applications and open it; it appears in your menu bar, ready for the rest of the setup. There is nothing to download yet — see the notice at the top of this page.

macOS says it "cannot be opened"?

Expected on first launch — the app isn't notarized by Apple yet. Click Done (not "Move to Bin"), then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

This happens once. After that, Teslaris opens like any other app.

02

Let Teslaris create your key

Tesla asks every app to prove its identity with a security key published on the web. Teslaris does all of it for you: open Settings… and click Set Up Key Hosting. Nothing to type, nothing to understand.

It hands you back a web address — keep it for the next step.

What's actually happening here?

Teslaris creates a key pair on your Mac and publishes only the public half, then fills in the domain for you. The private key never leaves your machine, and a public key is public by design — Tesla downloads it without any authentication.

03

Create your free Tesla developer app

This is the one part nobody can automate, and the only part that feels technical. Sign in at developer.tesla.com with your normal Tesla account and create a new application — it's free.

Tesla's form asks for a handful of things under unfamiliar names. Don't try to work them out — open the panel below and copy the answers.

What to put in Tesla's form

Two of Tesla's own requirements first, both easy to trip over: your Tesla account needs a verified email and multi-factor authentication enabled, and the application name must be unique across all of Tesla's developers — requests are auto-rejected if the name is taken, so pick something personal rather than "Teslaris".

OAuth grant type
Authorization code and machine-to-machine. Teslaris needs both — machine-to-machine registers the app, authorization code reads your car. "Machine-to-machine only" will not work.
Allowed Origin URL
The web address Teslaris gave you in step 2, with https:// in front, e.g. https://tesla-5422dc3b98.weareheavy.dev
Allowed Redirect URI
Exactly this, and nothing else. Tesla refuses to sign users in for a localhost redirect, so this HTTPS address hands the sign-in straight back to Teslaris on your Mac:
https://teslaris-keys.weareheavy.dev/oauth/callback
Allowed Returning URL
Leave it empty.
Scope
vehicle_device_data, and nothing else — Teslaris is read-only and needs no other permission.
Payment method
Required — under Billing and Usage, add a card and set a billing limit (e.g. $10). Tesla disables an app with no payment method, which shows up later as a baffling "No policy rules" error at sign-in. The $10 monthly individual-developer discount covers normal use, so with a billing limit set your real cost stays near zero.

When you're done, keep the Client ID and Client Secret handy — they go into Teslaris in step 4. Select the whole field before copying: the Client ID is exactly 36 characters (8-4-4-4-12), and a paste that drops the last one fails later with a confusing error.

Tesla approves most applications within minutes, but it can take up to a few business days. Until then the next step will fail — that's Tesla's queue, not something you've done wrong.

04

Paste the two codes, and sign in

Back in Settings…, paste your Client ID and Client Secret, pick your region, and click Register App with Tesla.

Then Save & Sign in with Tesla… — your browser opens Tesla's own login page, you approve it there, and your car appears in the menu bar. That's the last of it.

Questions, answered plainly

Is my data safe?

Your car's data goes straight from Tesla's Fleet API to your Mac — it is never relayed, stored or logged anywhere else, and the car picture comes from Tesla's own public image renderer. Credentials and tokens live in the macOS Keychain, never in plaintext. There is no analytics and no tracking of any kind.

One exception worth naming: if you use Set Up Key Hosting, the app sends your public key once to a small service we run, which publishes it for Tesla to fetch. That is the entire interaction — no car data, no credentials, no account, and a public key is public by design. You can skip it entirely by hosting the key yourself and typing your own domain into Settings.

What exactly does the key hosting service see?

One HTTP request during setup, containing one EC public key. It stores that key and serves it at the path Tesla requires, on a subdomain generated just for you. It never sees your Client Secret, your Tesla login, your VIN or anything about your car — those only ever travel between your Mac and Tesla.

Keys are write-once: nothing can overwrite or replace a published key, there is no way to list them, and the key it serves grants no access to any vehicle — Tesla uses it only to verify that an application controls its domain. The source is in the repository.

Will it wake my car or drain the battery?

No. Teslaris never wakes a sleeping vehicle — it shows the last known data, marked as such, until the car wakes on its own. Wakes cost API credit and drain the battery, so not waking is a feature, not a limitation.

Can it unlock or control the car?

No. The only scope Teslaris ever requests is vehicle_device_data — read-only. Even if you wanted it to open the trunk, it can't.

Why do I need my own Tesla developer app?

Tesla meters API usage per developer account, with about 5,000 free credits a month. If Teslaris shipped one shared key, all users would drain a single account's credits and the app would have to charge a subscription. With your own free key, your usage stays inside your own free credits — forever free, structurally.

Can the API costs run away?

No — four layers prevent it. Polling adapts to state (15 min parked, 5→1 min while charging, 30 min asleep); the menu shows a credit gauge — the free monthly credit covers ~5,000 requests, shown on a progress bar that resets monthly; past ~84% of the credits, Teslaris stretches all polling to 30 minutes until they reset; and Tesla requires a payment method on the app with a billing limit you set, which it never charges past. The $10 monthly individual-developer discount covers normal use, so the practical cost is around zero — but note the payment method is mandatory: without one Tesla disables the app and sign-in fails.

Which cars are supported?

Model S, 3, X and Y, in North America / Asia-Pacific and Europe / Middle East / Africa. Cybertruck works too, minus the car picture. China isn't supported yet (Tesla uses a separate auth system there).

Is this a Tesla product?

No. Teslaris is an independent, MIT-licensed open source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Tesla, Inc. "Tesla" and the model names are Tesla's trademarks, used only to describe compatibility.

Host the key yourself

Generate the pair, publish the public half on any domain you control, and type that domain into the Key domain field instead. Teslaris never contacts our key service in that case.

openssl ecparam -name prime256v1 -genkey -noout -out private-key.pem
openssl ec -in private-key.pem -pubout -out com.tesla.3p.public-key.pem

Tesla looks for it at exactly this path — a free GitHub Pages site (username.github.io) works well:

https://YOUR-DOMAIN/.well-known/appspecific/com.tesla.3p.public-key.pem

Keep private-key.pem safe. Teslaris never uses it — it only matters if you later want Tesla's vehicle command API.