Twitter’s tumultuous journey with its API continues under the leadership of Elon Musk. The company recently unveiled a new tier called “Pro” for developers. Priced at $5,000 per month, it falls between the $100 per month Basic plan and the custom-priced Enterprise plans.
The Twitter API Pro plan offers developers monthly access to retrieve one million tweets and post 300,000 tweets at the app level. It also includes rate-limited access to endpoints for real-time filtered streams, allowing users to access live tweets based on specific parameters, as well as complete archive search functionality for historical tweets. Additionally, the Pro plan provides three app IDs and Login with Twitter access.
However, the steep price of $5,000 per month for companies seeking to “experiment, build, and scale their business” creates a significant gap between the Pro plan and the next tier down, the $100 per month basic plan. The basic plan offers only a fraction of the access provided by the Pro plan, leaving small businesses with a dilemma: choose a level that may not meet their needs for the monthly fee of $100 or opt for the expensive $5,000 plan that may exceed the budgets of many startups.
Some users expressed their disappointment, stating that the limits imposed by the Pro plan were too restrictive given the price. In response to Twitter’s announcement, Maxime Dupré, the developer of Birdy, commented, “That’s cool, but you already killed most Twitter apps by now. And $5K is still too much for most of us. A $1K plan could make sense… but then again it’s too late.” The pricing structure also appears unfavorable for researchers, who have been facing high costs for accessing the platform’s data.
? Calling all start-ups ?
Today we are launching our new access tier, Twitter API Pro!
Experiment, build, and scale your business with 1M Tweets per month, including our powerful real-time Filtered/Stream and Full Archive Search endpoints. We look forward to seeing what you…
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) May 25, 2023
Twitter’s recent API changes have caused turbulence for developers who rely on the company’s data. In January, the company effectively eliminated most third-party clients, quietly updating its terms to reflect the change. In February, it announced the end of free API access but faced backlash from users, leading to a delay in implementing the change and the promise of a new read-only version of the free tier for “testing” purposes. While the old version of the free API was completely discontinued in April, Twitter reinstated it for emergency services in May. The platform introduced the initial three tiers (free, basic, and enterprise) of the new API in March before adding the recently announced $5,000 Pro tier. However, as Twitter has already alienated many developers who previously relied on its platform, it remains to be seen how successful the company will be in attracting new customers, particularly smaller operations, to the expensive Pro plan.
