A week after Twitter made the announcement about shutting down free access to the API, the company said today it will charge $100 per month for the base level of the API. This gives developers access to a “low level of API usage” – without specifying what exactly that means – and the Ads API.
The company planned to discontinue free access to its API on February 9, and now it has extended that deadline to February 13. But with no details on the restructuring of API pricing and access levels, this extension seems symbolic, as developers won’t. plan their changes.
Last week’s announcement drew a lot of criticism from developers, especially people who joke about bots posting information or images. Later, Elon Musk said the company will provide a free API to bots that post “good” content. In its latest series of announcements, Twitter said it will provide a light, write-only API to such bot developers with a limit of 1,500 tweets per month (or two tweets per hour).
Twitter also added that it will write off the premium API, which was part of v1.1, on February 13. While the company said developers can request corporate access, it’s not clear if people who have subscribed to elevated access with API v2 will be affected.
While the new announcement lays the groundwork for basic API layers and bots, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding academic research. Under the previous management, the company provided dedicated access to researchers with API v2. However, there is no information that access will be taken away as the social network stops free API tiers. Investigators rely on this data to spot trends around hate speech or misinformation on the platform. So it is critical that these researchers have permission to access the data to observe security issues on Twitter.
Apart from this, people have also pointed out that engineers building solutions for natural disasters like earthquakes also rely on Twitter API. So discontinuing the free tier will affect those solutions.
Making API access paid is Musk’s latest move to bring more money to Twitter. The company has now expanded Twitter Blue to 15 countries. According to recent reports, only 180,000 people have signed up for it in the US. The information noted that at this rate, Twitter will only earn $27.8 million in subscriptions this year.