First reported in Wired, Twitter is planning to put its API access behind a paywall and the cost is HUGE. The cheapest package gives access to 50 million tweets at a cost of more than half a million dollars a year. That’s the starting point. The large package for enterprise businesses goes up to $2.5 million a year.
Previous plans include free tiers, although enterprise users might pay up to $3,000 a month, according to Mashable.
Here’s another twist. The free tier offered access to 1% of tweets while the lowest plan only offer access to 0.3% of tweets.
Several apps and software platforms that relied on free or inexpensive access have already shut down. The other big impact is on researchers. The free tier was used for the analysis of sentiment that spawned hundreds of research papers.
Twitter has twice delayed the implementation of the new fees, originally slated to start in Feb 2023.