Twitter today, Thursday, officially announced the launch of its new API access pricing structure, after weeks of delays.
Tiers of access to the new API include a free tier for content posting bot accounts, a basic tier for $100 per month, and a third premium tier for businesses.
In a series of tweets via its developer account @TwitterDev, the company said that subscribing to any of the three tiers provides free access to the Ads API.
And Twitter alerted that during the next 30 days, it will cut off access to the old access levels, including: the Standard level (for version 1.1), the Essential and Elevated levels (for version 2), in addition to the Premium level.
The “saga” of Twitter’s API began in early February, when a plan was announced to end free access to the interface as of February 9, and to impose a monthly fee on those who want to use it.
The Twitter API is a service for software developers and researchers to enable them to use it to create extensions for browsers that modify and improve the experience of using the site, or to create automated accounts (bots) that automatically publish tweets or auto-reply to them.
Academic researchers rely on the service to access public tweets for analysis and studies, and now they worry they will have to pay to access tweets.
Immediately after announcing the termination of free access to the API, many researchers and developers who depend on the service expressed their dissatisfaction with converting it to a paid service, so what was the CEO of (Elon Musk) except that he partially retracted the decision, and he said in his tweet In response to the feedback, Twitter will make a lightweight, write-only API available to bots that provide quality, free content.
Although the launch of this new API platform was scheduled for February 9, the company has postponed the launch until February 13. Then she returned to announce that the launch would be postponed again for “a few more days,” and here she is announcing the launch after about 45 days.
It is believed that the new API offers are nothing more than an attempt by Twitter to extract money from those wishing to take advantage of the capabilities of the API, as the free level provides only 1,500 post requests per month, in addition to access to the (Login with Twitter) Login feature. with Twitter.
The base level, which the company said is aimed at “hobbyists and students,” provides 50,000 post requests and 10,000 read requests per app per month. So developers wanting to access more data will have to subscribe to the Business tier, which will reportedly be available at a hefty $42,000 per month.
Previously, with the launch of version 2 of the API in 2020, Twitter provided multiple levels of access to developers, such as: (basic) Essential and (high) Elevated, which allowed them to reach between 500,000 and two million tweets per month. Now, app developers who want that number of Tweets must opt in at the enterprise level.
Over the past few months, Twitter’s moves have alienated the developer community. In the past year, the company closed several projects related to developers, including: Twitter Toolbox to discover applications, and froze many other projects.
Last January, the company blocked third-party clients from access without any explanation, and later changed its developer terms invisibly to ban alternative Twitter apps.
