Twitter
The Twitter 2.0 team has introduced new pricing options for API access that might drive many smaller apps and third-party tools off the market by drastically raising the cost and limiting developer and researcher access.
Scheduling tools, Twitter analysis platforms, and bot accounts—all of these third-party apps—can read and write Twitter data thanks to Twitter’s API access program, which gives developers the ability to create such apps. Twitter had previously provided a generous free API access tier, but Musk and the company are aiming to increase the price, which will drive many developers out of the market for Twitter tools.
The following are the updated Twitter API access tiers:
- Free – This entitles you to write-only access to Twitter with a monthly tweet limit of 1,500.
- Basic – At $100 per month, Twitter’s new Basic tier will allow users to post up to 3,000 tweets per month or 50,000 tweets per month for apps. The monthly read cap for this tier is 10,000 tweets.
- Enterprise – This is for large platforms that heavily rely on the Twitter API, and the price will reflect that. Although there are no details provided, reports indicate that this category will cost more than $40k per month.
A different access plan for academic researchers is also being developed, according to Twitter, which may open up additional access to tweet data. Nevertheless, that offering hasn’t been confirmed yet, so for the time being, researchers will also have to select one of these additional levels to work with.
By limiting access, Twitter may become less useful as a source of data while also making it more challenging to evaluate performance, both of which may have unintended consequences. Nevertheless, according to the Twitter 2.0 team, the present API access is allowing bot operators to expand their networks, thus it needs to change. At the same time, Twitter also needs to increase revenue because advertisers’ budgets are still being cut.
