Twitter has announced on one of its official accounts that it will stop offering free access to the Twitter API starting February 9th. Elon Musk 's company will cease providing free access to the Twitter API and will instead offer a "basic paid tier."
The Twitter API allows developers to retrieve and analyze public data from Twitter, which can then be used to create programmable bots and standalone applications. Twitter currently offers limited free access to its API, along with scalable premium tiers for developers who need to remove endpoint access restrictions and unlock additional enterprise features. But this change will make everyone have to pay for even the most basic levels.
If you use the Twitter API, you have to pay
Twitter has not yet published pricing for its premium API tiers. Last February, it was reported that fees start at $99 per month and increase based on the access level required. One would expect the most basic tier to be even cheaper. However, this will affect hundreds of automated accounts, which will have to cease operations if they cannot afford to discontinue them because they are no more profitable than their personal accounts.
The decision to remove free access to the Twitter API comes after the platform updated its developer rules and banned third-party clients on Twitter.
Many small developers have used the free access to the Twitter API to create fun tools and useful bots, which is the reason many people stay on the social network. Some of them are weather trackers and others are non-profit black and white image colorizers. It will not only affect automated accounts, it will also affect students and scientists who use the platform to study online behavior and gather information for research papers.
This would be one of the ways the new Twitter management is looking to monetize the social network as much as possible. They already introduced the so-called Twitter Blue verification feature, meant to prove that a user is a real person linked to a phone number, although this ended up being used to impersonate real users and companies because the icon was the same, until it was changed to an official yellow icon.
