Mike -- Your statement is factually false. Both DataSift and Gnip have two components of the cost they charge consumers for their search-based products. The fir

Mike -- Your statement is factually false. Both DataSift and Gnip have two components of the cost they charge consumers for their search-based products. The first is a data license cost (10 cents per thousand tweets sent to the consumer) and a processing cost. In the case of Gnip, the processing cost is essentially the cost of the machine you license, while for DataSift it is the AWS-style compute cost. How they show these costs to the consumer may vary, but they are each compensate Twitter for the cost of the data license. To simplify: <total cost> = <data cost> + <processing cost> <total cost> = <$0.10 * #tweets % 1000> + <processing cost levied by Gnip or DataSift> Thanks, Doug