Why the fee appeared
It isn't a price rise on a service you signed up for — it's a different company charging for what used to be bundled. SunPower filed Chapter 11 in 2024 and shut down all official support on September 20, 2024, taking the mySunPower app, the web portal and the phone line with it. SunStrong Management took over the monitoring platform, primarily serving lease and PPA customers, and rebuilt the app as freemium.
The split lands where it hurts most: free gives you real-time power flow and system health, while Premium at about $9.99/mo (roughly $99/year) holds historical data, panel-level monitoring and analytics.
Why that split is the annoying one
Real-time power tells you the system is on right now. It cannot tell you:
- whether this year is worse than last year — that needs history;
- whether one panel out of thirty has quietly failed — that needs panel-level data;
- whether the bill creeping up is your solar or your usage — that needs both.
Those are the questions people actually have. Owners also widely report that paying for access to data from equipment they own outright feels wrong, and some who prepaid annual monitoring report receiving no data after their subscription anniversary date. If you're irritated, you're not being unreasonable.
What you can do instead
Read your own gateway — free, DIY
Your PVS gateway holds the data locally and exposes it on your own network. Open-source projects have read it for years: krbaker/hass-sunpower and smcneece/ha-esunpower for Home Assistant, thomastech/SunPower-Web-Monitor standalone, pypvs as a library. Cost: $0 plus a Raspberry Pi or a server you already run.
Trade-offs, stated plainly: it usually needs an isolated network segment, polling the gateway too hard can destabilise it, and firmware changes break things — March 2025 (server URLs) and September 2025 (added authentication, 403 errors) both did.
Pay once instead of monthly
A plug-in monitor does the local reading for you. Watt Hacker's free Kilowatt tier gives live production and per-panel status with no subscription and no card on file — you pay once for the monitor and nothing after. Paid Megawatt ($8/mo, or $72/yr at $6/mo) adds history and alerts, and is optional.
Compared like-for-like: SunStrong Premium is $9.99/mo indefinitely. Megawatt annual works out at $6/mo. The free tier is $0 either way — the difference is that ours includes per-panel status.
Where Watt Hacker fits
Watt Hacker is a small monitor that plugs into your existing SunPower PVS5 or PVS6 gateway on your own home network and reads it directly. It doesn't rely on SunPower's or SunStrong's servers, because for owners like you those are either gone or behind a paywall. No electrician and no rewiring.
- The monitor is $50 once (list $100), with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Kilowatt is free forever — live power and per-panel status, no card on file. $58 to start (monitor + $8 shipping).
- Megawatt adds full history, dollar-framed alerts and reports: $8/mo, or $72/yr ($6/mo). 1 month free with a monitor, free shipping, cancel anytime.
- Built by one person, not a company that can be sold out from under you. Who's behind it.
Common questions
Why does the SunPower app charge a monthly fee now?
SunPower went bankrupt in 2024 and shut down support on September 20, 2024. SunStrong Management took over the monitoring platform and rebuilt the app on a freemium basis: a free Basic tier with real-time power flow and system health, and a Premium tier at roughly $9.99 a month or $99 a year for historical data, panel-level monitoring and analytics.
What do I still get for free?
SunStrong's free Basic tier includes real-time power flow and a system-health view. What moved behind the paywall is history, panel-level monitoring and analytics.
Do I have to pay to see my own solar data?
No. Your PVS5 or PVS6 gateway holds your production data locally on your own home network. It can be read without any subscription, either with free open-source software or with a monitor that does it for you.