Twitter as of February 9th will start charging developers to use their API.
Twitter to end free access to its API in Elon Musk's latest monetization push | TechCrunchTwitter to end free access to its API in Elon Musk's latest monetization push | TechCrunch
Twitter will discontinue offering free access to the Twitter API starting February 9 and will launch a paid version.
techcrunch.com
Chime in with your thoughts on this.
Top comments (24)
I’m disappointed in this move for a few reasons. One, February 9th is 7 days away. That’s pretty short notice. Two, not offering a free tier at least is a bad move. There are lots of APIs with a free usage tier like YouTube.
I’m also disappointed that some software I use will no longer work.
It's a striking example of a bad start. IMHO, they started "too open," and tried to monetize something that was already available for free. Now, the downgrade effect is kinda bad:
Quick chronology:
I have to agree. It's easy to jump on the lolTwitter bandwagon these days, but if it were any other company, we'd be very sensibly discussing the downsides of certain API business models and their evolution.
Do you think requiring payment will do anything to reduce the number of bots and "fake users" on the site?
Just saw the pricing and wow! Ridiculous.
There's a clarification follow-up tweet that this is for the premium API - so it'll at least be slightly less expensive for the Basic plan, but sure don't have a good feeling about the pricing for Basic 😬
Imagine, at the cheapest tier, a single API call costs you $0.30. $0.30 to perform a search, post a tweet, etc. Ridiculous.
Owwh woah 😱😵
Up to 250 it's still free.
Never used the API but even $14.90, just 10% of fee, is too high. Needs to be $5.00 per 1000 max.
I would spend that in 10 minutes just for testing.
Jeez, my eyes!
looks like a fake
A lot of recent changes at Twitter looks like a made up lie. You can find the same number here:
developer.twitter.com/en/pricing/s...
I guess the free API was a strategy to gain traction in the early days and to promote the worth of the platform as the voice of the people. Building apps and tools against it felt fine as it had existed for so long; it never got a soft landing to a more sensible commercial model, instead EM has decided it just doesn't make any sense - he's the one responsible for the billions of dollars in interest payments alone.
There is no intrinsic reason why anyone should access Twitter data for free, it doesn't make sense as it costs money to deliver the service and creates many other outlets that effectively compete with part of the business's core - it's Twitter client app etc.
I see this as different to Heroku in that the primary purpose of that business is to host apps, the primary purpose of Twitter is nothing to do with an app ecosystem or third party data-analytics. Even so, who can blame Heroku for trying to economise with soaring energy prices that directly affect their bottom line?
The problem with relying on soft agreements, with no guarantees of future availability, is that your whole business model can vanish over night. I've seen it happen with companies relying on Facebook data, Facebook have seen it happen with Apple privacy changes etc etc.
Sadly, for businesses who have relied on a free service and who cannot justify whatever the costs end up being, it's time to move on. My advice is to be sure of the licensing agreements you enter into, caveat emptor.
The very short window to try to work out a plan does seem very unfair and I am not at all sure that the reputational damage isn't going to cost quite a lot. EM is gambling that it will work and people have short memories. We'll see.
"Sadly, for businesses who have relied on a free service and who cannot justify whatever the costs end up being, it's time to move on"
@miketalbot The time to move on started at the moment the Tesla dude acquired Twitter. He is infinitely greedy with immense ego and does not deserve to keep any of Twitter subscribers. His pricing is ridiculous.
He is not a real human, as he takes the whole universe as his playground, exposing all his lack of morale, responsibility, (... this goes really long here, enumerating positive virtues). Once he gets ignored by sufficient number of people, he will simply implode (he suffers from the same disease that Trump has, except he is very smart, but not sufficiently smart to correctly diagnose himself
I have already written about this on another post by @erinposting. I think it really limits the creativity of developers, we won't be able to do anything unless we pay for access.
And I admit it's not great of them, but the time allowed before the change is so short... 😡
Twitter to revoke free access to the Twitter API beginning Feb 9
Erin Bensinger ・ Feb 2 ・ 1 min read
I can't say I'm disappointed, as Twitter has been acting weirdly since as far as I can remember, sometimes eating third-party apps alive.
They broke stuff without transparent communication, giving headaches to many developers. It might sound easy to speak with insight and, as everybody wants to get the precious data, a lot of money is at stake.
However, I must admit I never liked this API, and had lots of problems following changes with my own wrapper (I used to maintain a Twitter library for a CMS).
I'm not surprised, especially considering the bombshell they dropped a couple of weeks ago where they banned third party apps.
This is worst. Thousands of projects will die. Just like heroku. The other day i was looking on the repo of open API, I've 2 in 10 api's are dead because of heroku.
This is so bad.
you can still use the unofficial api like nitter
I have 2 bots running on Twitter, the only solution I think is using an unofficial twitter api like twttrapi.com