Twitter’s API curler coaster beneath Elon Musk continues. The corporate announced a brand new “Professional” tier for builders right this moment. 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 affords month-to-month entry to 1 million retrieved tweets and 300,000 posted tweets on the app degree. It additionally consists of rate-limited entry to endpoints for real-time filtered streams (stay 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 📣
At this time we’re launching our new entry tier, Twitter API Professional!
Experiment, construct, and scale your corporation 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) May 25, 2023
Nevertheless, the $5,000 / mo. pricing for corporations desirous to “experiment, construct, and scale [their] enterprise” leaves an unlimited hole between it and the $100 / mo. fundamental plan, the following tier down. The latter solely affords a tiny fraction of the entry within the Professional plan, leaving small companies to decide on between a degree that will not present sufficient for a $100 month-to-month charge vs. a $5,000 plan that stretches past many startups’ budgets.
Some customers additionally voiced their perception that its limits had been too tight for that worth. “That’s cool, however you already killed most Twitter apps by now,” Birdy developer Maxime Dupré responded to Twitter’s announcement. “And 5K remains to be an excessive amount of for many of us. A 1K plan may make sense… however then once more it’s too late.” The pricing additionally doesn’t seemingly do a lot for researchers, who the platform has been attempting to cost tens of 1000’s of {dollars} for entry.
Twitter’s current API adjustments have created fairly a bumpy trip for builders who nonetheless need entry to the corporate’s knowledge. 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 accessible for “testing” functions. (The outdated model of the free API was reduce off solely in April, though Twitter reenabled it for emergency providers in Could.) The platform rolled out the brand new API’s preliminary three tiers (free, fundamental and enterprise) in March earlier than including right this moment’s $5,000 professional tier. Nevertheless, as the corporate has already alienated most of the builders that after 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.
