Need? No. Want? Maybe.
I’m not much of a data nerd, but I do find the data aggragations interesting. For example, I know at any point how much electrons have cost me separated by DC (Superchargers) and AC (home EVSE). DC shows actual charges to my credit card, and AC shows consumption times my rate for electricity. I like that.
TeslaFi also shows a record of firmware changes, both the revision numbers and the days between updates. Could be manually logged, but don’t need to.
I really like the newly-added feature to automatically enable Sentry Mode at locations I’ve tagged. Since Sentry must be enabled each and every time from the car or Tesla app, this helps me a lot.
Current pricing is $50/year or $5/month. Could go up, but at that rate the information has been a nice adjunct to Tesla ownership and I plan to retain TeslaFi.
There are already new 3rd-party apps coming along (“Stats,” “Teslastics,” just to name two) and I’m sure more will come as the vehicles become more widespread. That said, for me, the newer apps are non-starters as none of them at this point can import previously captured data. For someone starting from scratch, it matters less.
Other posters have shared the best advice: try the trial. If you like it, great. If you don’t, try one of the other ones.
