Twitter officially announced its new API tiers, a month and half after Elon Musk, the new CEO, promised major changes to the system. The company’s official developer accounts provided details about the prices and read/write limits. It also provided links to signup pages which provide links to the first two tiers and the opportunity to express interest in the third.
According to the company, older tiers will be reduced “over the next thirty days”.
- Free — You can post up to 1,500 tweets per calendar month with write-only access.
- Basic — A $100 monthly subscription for hobbyists that allows you to post 3,000 tweets per user per month or 50,000 tweets each month at the app-level. 10,000 tweets are allowed.
- Enterprise — Offers “commercial-level access that addresses your and your customers’ specific needs.” platformer has previously reported that a low-cost enterprise plan could run as high as $42,000 per month.
Some developers responded to Twitter’s announcement by saying they would have to close their projects or charge users the fees. Accountanalysis developer Luca Hammer stated that he would have to close down his tool to assist journalists and academics in analysing Twitter accounts. Daniel Nguyen who uses Ktool to send Twitter threads to Kindle, said that the changes will either force him to discontinue supporting Twitter or raise prices.
A third developer asked to remain anonymous and called the free tier “terrible” due to the low post cap and inability to read simple information such as tweets and likes.
Other developers, like the team behind Tweet Scheduling Service Typefully, said they could afford the new pricing, and will continue to support the platform. Francesco Di Lorenzo , co-founder of Typefully, tweeted: “But this would totally kill us 1 year ago or when we started.”
The official details of the new tiers were announced by Twitter a month and half after it first announced that it was making major changes to the Twitter API starting February 9th. The company quickly missed the deadline and reversed the most controversial change which would have stopped free access to the API. This has now become a regular occurrence under Musk’s control of the social media network. published initial details regarding the new tiers last month. Summary of all three tiers on Twitter’s website.
Today’s Twitter thread provides far less information about the options available for academic researchers in future. It notes that Twitter is ” seeking new ways to serve this community.” Twitter’s changes to its API rules have been criticized by academics before reporting. This is because they rely heavily on the free and open API for their research.
Elon Musk, who took over the social media network, has been focused on increasing revenue and cutting costs . He fired thousands of employees , and doubled down on the company’s paid Twitter Blue subscription. While Musk originally justified the API changes with the claim that the services were being “abused badly” and “bot scammers and opinion manipulators”, it’s difficult to not see the company’s cost-cutting efforts as an attempt to squeeze more out of its developer community. It’s the same developer community that has already severely strained its relationship to.
