Twitter has come up with a new tier for developers who want to access its API. The platform now offers a Pro tier that costs $5,000 per month and gives developers access to a portion of Twitter’s data.
Since Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter has been in a dilemma about whether it should allow developers and companies to access its API. The platform first cut off free access to API and then charged premium customers $42,000 a month. A Basic tier at $100 is also available for users. However, since a $42,000 fee is pricy for developers and the $100 tier doesn’t provide access to much data, Twitter decided to launch a middle tier.
According to the company’s announcement, the Pro API package allows developers to access 1 million retrieved tweets and 300,000 posted tweets at the app level. The new tier also offers rate-limited access to a suite of v2 endpoints, including search and filtered stream.
Three app IDs and the ability to log in with Twitter are other perks of this package. Twitter API Pro tier is suitable for startups that want to scale their business.
Twitter offers a Pro API package for developers
From a business perspective, a $5,000 plan seems convincing because the $100 plan only allows access to 3,000 Tweets per month at the user level and 50,000 Tweets at the app level. So mid-sized startups have no choice but to pay $5,000 per month, resulting in a $60,000 bill at the end of the year.
However, a $5,000 monthly charge for accessing Twitter API is beyond the budget of most startups, especially in today’s economic slowdown. A Twitter user argued that the Pro tier is not enough for international events and doesn’t provide enough app IDs on rate-limited functions. Finally, the users noted that the pricing is too hefty for the majority of freelancers.
Twitter’s pricing policy for its API has also caused outrage in Big Tech. Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, recently accused Microsoft of violating Twitter data policy by not paying $50,000 a month to access the API.
2023-05-29 15:10:47