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Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month
- chatmasta 3y agoThis seems like a good way to create a gray market of "unofficial" Twitter "API" providers that charge $100 per month to automate Twitter with reverse engineered mobile API endpoints.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoI would be curious to see whether developers fall in line or have learned from the past.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- herbst 3y agoTwitter and their V1 api was one of the reasons I fell in love with programming and automation. Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month! It's sad.
- ThorsBane 3y agoFor me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained. Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special student pricing for student hobbyists. Aren't they also still doing a free option that's reasonable for testing out the api?
- spaceman_2020 3y ago$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.
- ThorsBane 3y agoYeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.
- d4mi3n 3y agoThis misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it. You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.
- tracker1 3y agoI honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.
- tracker1 3y agoI'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoBecause its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually. These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want. Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.
- WesternWind 3y agoThen they could provide it for a year, or six months, or one month. twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers. twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.
- herbst 3y agoThose $100 would have been barely enough for testing some things. That's more than my spending limit has been as 13yo. Sure I get what you mean, and I couldn't care less about today's twitter. But it still makes me sad to know that in today's work. 13yo me without PayPal or credit card wouldn't have any of that fun. And I imagine millions of people can't either.
- chimeracoder 3y ago> That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever. They did, for most of Twitter's history > ...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! On the contrary, the free availability of the Twitter API is inarguably what drove the growth of Twitter as a platform. Twitter benefited far more from it than the low marginal costs of operation. It's not even close.
- wpm 3y agoI pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".
- tracker1 3y agoThat is more likely the case here. They don't see profit from their side to make lower level access between the free and $100/mo tier as worth it... and would rather see corporate backed developers who are likely to have 5+ figure annual contracts than deal with tens of thousands of $10-20/mo subscribers disproportionally using the system.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoThe $100/mo API has extremely shit limits on top of being prohibitively expensive for prototyping. This will kill the mere idea of building anything on Twitter's API. Low friction and upfront costs are important for hobby projects and experimental prototypes. In this day and age it's expected that companies have generous free tiers for hobby/prototype usage, and it makes sense because it usually costs them pennies to provide it. Serving API requests is extremely cheap and the volume is almost always going to be so insignificant that they wouldn't even be able to tell if developers are using the API if not for API keys.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago> Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.
- abeppu 3y ago> they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads. I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%. Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today: - write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s). - interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day? - interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits. An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.
- system16 3y agoThe "Use Cases" they list are hilariously vague and devoid of content.
- grouchomarx 3y ago"build for fun" indie musician paying $100/mo for twitter
- RGBCube 3y agoIt's like paying $100 a month to be able to publish your fart noise app on the Apple Store.
- methodical 3y agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding your comment but if you're under the presumption the Apple Developer membership is $100/mo then I wanted to clarify it's actually $100/yr for Apple Developer (it's actually 99 but I'm not going to play semantics).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- willio58 3y agoThe shear amount of floundering that twitter has done since Elon bought it is hilarious as a non-user. I do feel bad for the people who just like using twitter though, like every other week the checkmark means something different. I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now. Elon really knows how to shake up a company! And by shake up I mean destroy one step at a time.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoFor quite some time, crypto scams and fake airdrops were literally showing up under sponsored posts. There was a big (real) Arbitrum airdrop and for for days, I would see ads for a (fake) airdrop.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago[flagged]
- JohnMakin 3y ago> are you/have you ever been worth over $100b-$200b? If not... how can you sit there and cast judgement as if you actually know anything about what's going on behind the scenes/at his wealth level?... This is such a hilarious fallacy it barely deserves a response. Hope you enjoy spending $8/month on twitter. His decisions have been objectively bad.
- bongoz 3y ago[dead]
- edu4hnta05159 3y ago[dead]
- lazyeye 3y agoI wonder if Twitter is already generating more revenue now compared to pre-Elon days when it was a massively over-staffed activist organisation.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI don’t want to scrape, but at these price points, small projects where I only need basic user profile data are simply more cost effective with scraping. Some very dumb decisions with their API pricing. How do you go from $0 to $100 to $5,000?
- herbst 3y agoWhen scraping with good expensive proxies is effectively cheaper than using the API the company is doing something wrong
- gorkish 3y agoOr right, depending on your perspective.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoServing API calls is way cheaper than serving scraper bots that load up the full page.
- tracker1 3y agoThe site doesn't mention how many profile lookups are allowed per month at the given tiers... how many user profiles are you looking up? Does this include tweets/retweets? As for the pricing, it's likely they really don't want anyone unlikely to hit the upper tier to even try developing against their APIs to begin with.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joatmon-snoo 3y agoA whopping additional app ID for the low, low price of an additional $4900/mo!
- methodical 3y agoI can't be the only person who noticed the double space in the first bullet point... Anyways, while I understand wanting to monetize their API instead of having it just be used by tons of people for free, the tiers here just seem like insanity. This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model. $100 for a hobbyist? I personally can't remember the last time I paid $100 on a monthly basis for any non-essential service that I was using as a hobby. Would be interested to see the amount of customers each one of these tiers was actually fielding...
- sebzim4500 3y ago>This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model. Why 'few instances'? I'd always prefer an API to be pay per request. It's my favourite thing about OpenAI (if you ignore the fact that big players can get access to the base model through Azure).
- methodical 3y agoI mean if they hypothetical company X has some tier that is extremely lenient with their limits and would likely end up cheaper than a pay-as-you-go model, I generally prefer going that route. That plus it also gives me some degree of certainty that if something erroneous happens I don't have the potential to end up spending $XXX or more.
- sickcodebruh 3y ago$100/month strikes me as a “we don’t want you” price. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can justify it but it will immediately turn away a hell of a lot of people. Maybe this was the point? Reduce API users to only the most motivated people/organizations and expect that many of them will grow into the next tier?
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoTotally agree, this reads as "go enterprise or GTFO"
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoI think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear.
- chimeracoder 3y ago> I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to a always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear. Maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but spammers aren't using the official API.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoYes, this does come as a surprise to me. Which API are they using?
- tracker1 3y agoTBH, if it were me, I'd probably be using something like playwrite/puppeteer against a real instance of Chrome browser. I mean, you won't get the scale/throughput of the Enterprise API, but probably good enough with browser profiles to be able to mostly fool Twitter and do what you need/want. That said, the free tier is probably good enough if you're relaying posts/information for most legit users, and the $100/month tier probably isn't good enough for businesses centered around deep Twitter API usage. Probably a net positive for society overall. Aside: I'd rather pay $5-10/month for an ad free experience (there's so many of them now) than the blue checkmark and related features.
- tmpz22 3y agoEffort spent on lower tiers takes away from higher tiers that make actual amounts of money for twitter. They don't want the $10/mo student because realistically that student is only going to be a drain on Twitter. They want the $100/mo "amateur" who has an actual shot at growing to a $1000/mo or beyond tier. If they don't blow up they want that user to stop paying and being a net-drain on Twitter's constrained and expensive (man-hours) resources. Further they want to price out some bad actors. See cheating differential in free vs. paid games. Look I disagree strong with Twitter's direction and leadership - but this pricing ain't the hill to die on.
- kstrauser 3y agoExcept without those free accounts, the others have no value. Who's going to spend $5000/month so they can talk to only other people who pay $5000/month?
- abeppu 3y agoDo they _want_ people to use it, or is this pricing specifically to get people to not use the API without having to actually announce they're killing it? They can let the API decay and this pricing will mean that its decline will be visible and relevant to far fewer people.
- kgwxd 3y agoThis is for people than need to flow money to Elon under the guise of a valid business transaction.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- somethoughts 3y agoCould this actually be a good thing for the Twitter bot problem? Are re-tweets/likes considered a tweet in the tweet limits? I'm not a heavy Twitter user or developer just a curious bystander and definitely don't have details into the "buy retweets" ecosystem so not sure if the "buy retweets"/buy social cred were using this type of API, humans or webscraping type scripts.
- kramerger 3y agoThat's a lot of money for a service that currently has single-nine availability.
- Devasta 3y agoWhat surprises me most is that Twitter doesn't appear to have anything that allows you post ads only to Twitter Blue subscribers. They are a set of users comprised almost entirely of absolute morons who believe everything they read online and also have money to spend on stupid buillshit like Twitter Blue, they are a goldmine for advertisers and this oppurtunity to bilk them of all their cash is just wasted.
- stoptrlling 3y ago[flagged]
- theprincess 3y agoI'm curious to know what sorts of things you were thinking about when you wrote this. The tone of it reads as emotional and defensive rather than informative. It would probably contribute more to the discussion if you expressed your own ideas rather than attempting to pre-empt the ideas of others by listing them in bullet point format. Wouldn't you agree? :3
- onemorething1 3y ago[flagged]
- Balgair 3y agoAside: Elon's got this all wrong. The checkmarks and other pricing tiers only weed out the dupes and conmen. Traditionally, a list of people that are dumb enough to do really dumb things and that have disposable income is very valuable. Having a list of known rubes isn't something you share, for free, to anyone. You charge a lot of money for that list, usually. But here's Elon, just giving away that list for anyone to see.
- dirtyid 3y agoHopefully this means feedly pro can support twitter integration again. In mean time, anyway aware of working method to turn tweets from a public list into a daily email digest? A couple methods I use to depend on died with API access gone. Or any app that reads a twitter list via TTS.