Twitter has unveiled a new API tier, termed Twitter API Pro, costing $5,000 per month, catering primarily to startups. The newly introduced tier provides developers the capacity to fetch 1 million tweets and post 300,000 tweets monthly, alongside granting access to the full archive search endpoint.
📣 Calling all start-ups 📣
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) May 25, 2023
Today we are launching our new access tier, Twitter API Pro!
Experiment, build, and scale your business with 1M Tweets per month, including our powerful real-time Filtered/Stream and Full Archive Search endpoints. We look forward to seeing what you…
Earlier, Twitter had declared its plans to terminate access to its free API tier but subsequently revised the decision, offering access to 1,500 tweets per month free of charge for content provider bots.
Positioned between the basic $100 per month tier and the enterprise tier costing $42,000 monthly, Twitter deems this new tier apt for "startups scaling their business."
The introduction of the new pricing stirred a debate among developers and founders, suggesting that Twitter should create a middle tier between Basic and Enterprise, catering to startups that cannot afford the hefty annual expense nearing half a million dollars.
The new Pro API tier addresses some of these concerns but may not resolve challenges for businesses operating on stringent budgets, as they would still need to spend $60,000 per year. The Pro tier's new posting limit might be ample for certain bots, but securing funds through subscriptions or donations to maintain the service over a prolonged period may prove challenging for developers.
A noteworthy omission in Twitter's offering is the lack of a solution for researchers and academics. Although the company stated in March that it was exploring new avenues to serve this demographic, no announcements have been made to date.
During a recent event, Musk stated that Twitter was on a "comeback arc," following significant cost-cutting measures. Earlier this month, Twitter welcomed Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBCU, as the CEO of both Twitter and the ambitious "everything app X."
