Twitter’s API curler coaster below Elon Musk continues. The corporate introduced a brand new “Professional” tier for builders in the present day. At $5,000 per 30 days, it falls between the $100 / month Primary and custom-priced Enterprise plans.
The brand new Twitter API Professional plan presents month-to-month entry to at least one million retrieved tweets and 300,000 posted tweets on the app stage. It additionally consists of rate-limited entry to endpoints for real-time filtered streams (reside entry to tweets primarily based on specified parameters) and an entire archive search of historic tweets. Lastly, it provides three app IDs and Login with Twitter entry.
📣 Calling all start-ups 📣
As we speak we’re launching our new entry tier, Twitter API Professional!
Experiment, construct, and scale your small business with 1M Tweets per 30 days, together with our highly effective real-time Filtered/Stream and Full Archive Search endpoints. We sit up for seeing what you…
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) Might 25, 2023
Nonetheless, the $5,000 / mo. pricing for firms desirous to “experiment, construct, and scale [their] enterprise” leaves an unlimited hole between it and the $100 / mo. primary plan, the subsequent tier down. The latter solely presents a tiny fraction of the entry within the Professional plan, leaving small companies to decide on between a stage that will not present sufficient for a $100 month-to-month payment vs. a $5,000 plan that stretches past many startups’ budgets.
Some customers additionally voiced their perception that its limits have been too tight for that value. “That’s cool, however you already killed most Twitter apps by now,” Birdy developer Maxime Dupré responded to Twitter’s announcement. “And 5K continues to be an excessive amount of for many of us. A 1K plan might make sense… however then once more it’s too late.” The pricing additionally doesn’t possible do a lot for researchers, who the platform has been making an attempt to cost tens of hundreds of {dollars} for entry.
Twitter’s latest API modifications have created fairly a bumpy journey for builders who nonetheless need entry to the corporate’s information. First, the corporate successfully killed most third-party shoppers in January earlier than quietly updating its phrases to mirror the change. Then, it introduced in February that it was ending free API entry, solely to delay the transfer after widespread blowback whereas promising {that a} new read-only model of the free tier would stay obtainable for “testing” functions. (The previous model of the free API was lower off solely in April, though Twitter reenabled it for emergency companies in Might.) The platform rolled out the brand new API’s preliminary three tiers (free, primary and enterprise) in March earlier than including in the present day’s $5,000 professional tier. Nonetheless, as the corporate has already alienated lots of the builders that when relied on its platform, it stays to be seen how efficient will probably be at luring new clients — particularly smaller operations — into the costly new plan.
