Twitter just announced its new API pricing, which includes three tiers – free, basic, and enterprise. The announcement has caused concern among small developers who fear they may not be able to afford the new fees. The company’s official developer account provided some details on the prices and read and write limits for each tier in a thread and linked to signup pages for the first two tiers.
According to Twitter, older tiers will be deprecated over the next 30 days. The free tier offers write-only access with the ability to post 1,500 tweets per month at no cost. The basic tier, which costs $100 per month, allows hobbyists to post 3,000 tweets per month at the user level or 50,000 tweets per month at the app level, with a read limit of 10,000 tweets. The enterprise tier promises to offer commercial-level access and managed services from a dedicated account team, but no specific price was listed.
Some developers responded to the announcement by saying they would have to shut down their projects or pass the fees onto users. Others, such as the team behind tweet scheduling service Typefully, said they could afford the new pricing and would continue supporting the platform.
However, there has been criticism of the new pricing from academic researchers who rely on Twitter’s API to conduct research. The company has said it is “looking at new ways to continue serving this community” but did not provide details.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s CEO, has been focusing on cutting costs and boosting revenue since taking over the social media network. While he initially justified the API changes by saying the free service was being abused by bot scammers and opinion manipulators, some have speculated that the changes are an attempt to increase margins from the developer community. This move may further strain Twitter’s relationship with developers, which has been a contentious issue in the past.
