This is pretty much what Gnip offered, but with an usable API. My company did request an historical sample to GNIP one year ago: we had to contact the sales an

This is pretty much what Gnip offered, but with an usable API. My company did request an historical sample to GNIP one year ago: we had to contact the sales and send them a query blind-written following their docs. Then they run a job and gave a link to download the ZIP. I can imagine high paying customers to have direct access to their API. Still it was pretty much evident, than the extraction time was significant (say from 1 to 3 days). The main difference thus appears to be speed. Still, you need to contact sales, so I can't say nothing about the new prices.