Twitter details new API access tiers: Free with 1.5K tweets/month at app level, Basic for $100/month, and Enterprise; old APIs will stop working within 30 days
Twitter has finally confirmed some of the details and pricing for the new version of its API.
The move extends a decade-long arc rather than starting one — Twitter had already begun charging developers with the premium APIs launched in 2017 and the full-archive search product priced near $99/month in 2018. With advertising under pressure ($1.08B in Q2 2022 against $4B for all of 2021), the company is turning developer access into a direct line item instead of a subsidy for its ecosystem.
First-order effects
Developers running bots, clients, and research tools on free access must re-architect around a 1,500-tweets-per-month app-level cap or move to the $100/month Basic tier before their existing integrations stop working within 30 days.
Enterprise customers become the only path to serious volume, forcing every third-party client and analytics vendor to renegotiate pricing directly with Twitter.
Second-order effects
Third-party tools whose economics were built on free data face a margin squeeze: at $100/month per app for modest volume, hobbyist products either pass costs to users or shut down, thinning the surrounding client ecosystem.
Rival platforms can position themselves as the open alternative for displaced developers, competing for exactly the bot, alerting, and research workloads Twitter just priced out of its free tier.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, platform APIs complete their shift from growth subsidy to metered product — with Twitter's own history (2017 premium search, 2018 archive access, now universal paid tiers) serving as the template other social platforms may follow when they need revenue independent of advertising.
A paywalled firehose concentrates data access in fewer, wealthier hands, which reshapes who can build third-party experiences and weakens the open-ecosystem dynamic that historically defined Twitter's developer relations.
The trend: Twitter is converting its developer API from an open distribution channel into capacity-priced subscription tiers, completing the monetization arc that began with its 2017 premium APIs.
Over the next 30 days, we will deprecate current access tiers such as Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition.
We are also launching a new Basic (v2) access for hobbyists with 10,000 GET/month and 50,000 POST/month, 2 app IDs, and Login with Twitter for $100/month. Subscribe now: https://developer.twitter.com/ ...
No Researcher in the world should be talking about online harms, presenting social media research or talking about how it's changing society without also raising the threat of data access. Because it won't be researchers who fix this one, but everyone else https://twitter.com/...
This is an absolute travesty from a researcher perspective. Online hate and extremism research, also misinfo and disinfo, will be particularly badly affected, to the detriment of policymakers and publics. Potentially even democracy itself. https://twitter.com/...
I'm happy to report that @typefully will keep running and growing💪 But honestly it's a sad day for the developer community. Typefully started as a weekend side project. It wouldn't exist with this new pricing. https://twitter.com/...
twitter just released their new API: - the post limit is down from 2400 to 97 per day (I post 1000-2000 per day) - to keep the same access it reportedly costs $42000 per month tldr, most interactive twitter bots will stop on April 29th unless they change it 🪦😭 https://twitter.com…
This is is going to destroy Twitter's developer ecosystem in the short/medium-term. $100 / month for 50k POSTs sounds reasonable-ish, until you realize it's limited to 3k tweets per user / month and most helpful bots have a single user... https://twitter.com/...
Care about stopping hate speech? Or stemming information warfare? Countering extremism? Electoral integrity? This single move is going to remove a vast chunk of social media research that informs all of that. There should be questions in Parliament about this. https://twitter.com…
This is an amazing and innovative new way to ensure no one builds anything on the platform and we can continue to monetize everything, everywhere, always. Gotta pay off a $44 billion purchase, after all! https://twitter.com/...
Haha, oh wow. So spamming is free, but want to read more than 2 tweets per hour pay ridiculous amounts? Yeah that ain't happening. I'm sure this will have absolutely *stellar* results for the platform. https://twitter.com/...
The new @TwitterAPI Basic Access for $100 per month got added in to the Dev Portal, and it's absolutely miserly. 10,000 Tweet Monthly cap on Search & Stream That was previously 2,000,000. Endpoints that had hundreds of calls per 15 minutes now have barely dozens. It's useless.
Elon continues to kill off third-party apps. First by seeding doubt, scaring away developers from building any new apps. Second, by pulling the plug on popular clients. Now, by introducing extremely high pricing making the majority of (big) apps economical unviable. https://twitt…
1) This is the death of Twitter indie products 2) Big Enterprise customers will be scared by the instability I suspect this will not go through. https://twitter.com/...
@IgorBrigadir @TwitterAPI Would be fascinating to hear from someone who genuinely has a project for which that set of limits at that price point makes sense
At least there's a way to keep the fun bots alive, but not much more than that... and none of the bots that e.g. respond to mentions or require any other read access 😕 https://twitter.com/...
Most, if not all, GAW pickers here use the Standard v1.1 API with Elevated v2 access, and the new Basic tier is capped at 10K Tweets per month. The only viable tier is Enterprise and reportedly starts at $42K per month. Smooth transition? More like no transition. https://twitter.…
In 30 days a huge paywall would block the Twitter API that we rely on for research https://twitter.com/... Appealing to developers to write/maintain/test read/write/search/stream/etc light-weight easy-to-use scrapers that support ALL (I wish) functionalities provided by the API