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Traccar, hosted: run it yourself or let us run it

Moon runs on a hardened Traccar core. If you were about to self-host Traccar, you are exactly who we built this for — and if you would rather keep self-hosting, this page tells you honestly what you would be buying instead.

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Self-hosted

What running it yourself gives you

Total control and no licence fee. Traccar is free and open source: you can put it on a small server, point your devices at it and pay nobody. You choose the version, the host, the retention, the integrations. Nothing on this page is an argument that you cannot do it — plenty of people do, and do it well.

What it costs instead is attention: the upgrades, the database as it grows, the backups and the restore you have never tested, and being the person who gets called when the map is empty on a Saturday.

Moon

What we add on top

  • Multi-tenant with companies inside companies, several levels deep.
  • SMS commands through the SIM platform, for devices that are not online right now.
  • Scheduled reports by email, and maintenance on real recorded distance.
  • Role-gated commands: engine cut limited to operators and admins, every attempt logged.
  • Backups off the box and updates we run, on the same build our own fleets are on.
  • Layered storage so the history does not become one table that grows forever.
  • Support from people who run 1,000+ vehicles on it themselves.

Self-hosted versus Moon

The row that decides it is usually the last one.

  Traccar you host Moon
The server Yours. You pick the host, size it, and own the bill and the console. Ours. Two boxes, an edge that terminates the device ports and a private backend with no public database.
Updates You track releases and decide when to take one, including the ones that change protocol handling. We run them, and we are running the same build your fleet is on.
Backups Yours to set up, and yours to test. Untested backups are the usual failure. Off-box backups from day one, because our own fleets are on the same system.
Uptime Depends on your host and on who is awake. A tracker that cannot connect does not retry forever. Monitored by us. Devices that go quiet are visible in the platform, not just missing.
History storage One table that grows forever unless you build the tiering yourself. Layered: recent positions hot, older history downsampled, raw data archived.
Multi-company Users and groups. A hierarchy of companies is not what it is for. Companies inside companies, several levels deep, each seeing only its own vehicles.
Your time The real cost. Every hour on the server is an hour not spent on the fleet. £19.99 / €22.99 per device per year, and the sysadmin work is not yours.

When the maths turns over

A 100-vehicle fleet on Moon costs £1,999 a year. A server for a fleet that size costs a fraction of that, so the licence is not paying for hardware — it is paying for the hours somebody would otherwise spend on upgrades, backups, monitoring and the occasional bad evening. Below a few dozen vehicles, and with the skills in-house, self-hosting genuinely wins. Above that, one incident tends to cost more than a year of licences.

For completeness: Traccar's own team also sells hosted options, published at from $9.95 a month for a tracking account and from $49.95 a month for a tracking server, plus professional services from $50 an hour (traccar.org published pricing, August 2026). Compare those against us too — a comparison page that hides the other honest option is not a comparison.

Source: traccar.org/pricing, read in August 2026. Their figures are in US dollars and ours are not converted.

See our pricing See the platform

Questions from people running their own Traccar

Can I migrate from my own Traccar server?
Yes, and it is the easiest migration we do. The same protocols are spoken on both sides, so the devices are repointed at our server — usually in batches, so part of the fleet moves while the rest keeps reporting where it did before. Nothing has to be reflashed and no hardware is replaced.
Do I still get API access?
Yes. Every account has the public API and webhooks, with no add-on and no separate plan. If you built something against your own server, tell us what it calls and we will tell you what changes.
What does "hardened" mean here?
That the core sits on a private network with no publicly reachable database, that the device ports are terminated at an edge that only speaks to it over that private link, and that the platform layer on top adds tenants, role-gated commands and audit logging that a bare install does not have.
Is self-hosting the wrong choice?
No. If you have the skills, enjoy it and run a small fleet, self-hosting is cheap and completely legitimate. It stops being cheap when someone has to be responsible for it at 2am, or when a fleet gets big enough that a bad upgrade costs a working day.

Send us your device list

Tell us what you run and how it is configured today. We will tell you what a migration looks like, in batches, and what it costs.

Talk to us support@moongpstracker.com