Ask HN: Twitter full access?

Recently I've come up with simple 'applications' of Twitter (amd related services like blogs and comments and whatnot) that for startups and other companies is easily worth $5 / month, I suspect I could build a monetazible product around it. So I looked around, and it seems Twitter used to have a full 'firehose' feed, but they stopped providing it. You can get on a developer 'whitelist' where you can get a 'representative' feed, which still isn't the full thing. I want the full thing. I think a lot of services and mashups are using API calls such as 'search', but this is very limited, as I'd want all the other data in order to extract the relevant signals. This is an unfortunate situation. I understand it's their product, but it seems like 'public resource'. To make a bad analogy, imagine if Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn't crawl the web because most of it was on one companies' servers and they wouldn't let them --- it'd be our loss. I found companies like gnip.com that seem to have access to the full Twitter data and are also aggregating other data. They're charging $1000 / year, which sounds reasonable, except I don't see a 'trial' to see what to expect. Also, how did they get full access and how much are they paying? Any ideas and insights would be appreciated!