As new CEO Elon Musk promised a significant systemic overhaul. Twitter has now formally announced its updated API tiers. The company’s official developer account revealed three tiers—free, basic, and enterprise. Along with some information about their costs and read-and-write restrictions in a discussion.
Also, it included links to registration pages, where users may sign up for the first two tiers. And also indicate their interest in the third. Twitter said that it would be phasing out older access levels, such as Standard (for v1.1), Essential and Elevated (for v2), and Premium, over the course of the next 30 days.
The three replacements are listed briefly below (and can also be seen on Twitter’s website):
- Free – Write-only access with unlimited posting of 1,500 tweets each month.
- Basic – A $100 monthly membership for casual users who can post up to 3,000 tweets per month as users or 50,000 tweets per month as apps. There is a 10,000 tweet read cap.
- Enterprise — Promising to provide “managed services [from] a dedicated account team”. In addition to “commercial-level access that matches your and your customer’s specific demands.” There was no mention of a price, but Platformer has previously stated that a “low-cost enterprise package” might cost as much as $42,000 per month.
The limited post cap and apparent inability to access basic data like tweets, likes, and following from the platform led one developer, who asked to remain anonymous, to declare the free tier “awful.” Many researchers and academics were concerned that Twitter’s decision to end its free API access last month. Because it would harm student projects and the platform’s data-driven transparency.
Twitter’s actions in recent months have alienated the developer community. The business discontinued a number of developer-related projects last year. Including Twitter Toolbox for app discovery, and numerous others are currently inactive. In January, the firm locked out third-party clients without any explicit communication.
Since taking over the social media platform, Elon Musk has concentrated on reducing expenses and increasing revenue. He has let go of thousands of people and increased the focus on Twitter Blue, the company’s paid subscription service.
Although Musk initially defended the API changes by claiming that the platform’s free services were “being badly abused” by “bot scammers, given his cost-cutting priorities. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Musk made the changes to Twitter’s API. In an effort to extract higher margins from the platform’s developer community.
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