Hello folks,
I’m still posting around here and I will continue to post on things that I think might be of interest.
As we continue to watch Twitter with interest, we’re now learning how much it might cost for API access.
As the folks at Tweesecake and other apps that blind people have said in the past, they have stopped developing for Twitter because of this change.
The article is titled Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone and I hope that these guys see this.
As we questioned in this blog post Twitter made it difficult to even get work done. Turns out they didn’t even want to pay their bill over there which lead to lots of problems.
As they started to roll out the paid product, we learn that SMS authentication will go behind a paywall.
If this wasn’t bad enough, businesses could keep their gold status for $1,000 per month.
But now, according to the updated pricing for API access, it starts at $42,000.
I responded on Mastodon that even for me, if I had the money, couldn’t pay for that long term without making more than tht a month which I don’t.
One paragraph about the pricing says:
The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months. The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.
Can I ask a question? Who the hell is going to pay $125,000 and $210,000 a month respectively for that access? aAcademics get 1 percent of tweet volume now, says the article, and it’ll be cut to 0.3 percent when it takes effect.
Let’s say that I’m sitting on 5 million dollars right now. If I divide that by the highest package, I get 23.35 which means I could pay for it for 11 months if I made no money at all. But academics use this for research and they don’t make that much money, even for a month at the higher teer of pricing.
As per usual in articles we’ve posted totday, a sentence like
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
was given.
You should read this article. Its beyond repair now, and I don’t know what the solution is going to be. Just look who’s even running this. If this is the way Elon is making money by this, we’ll see if that happens. Curious minds will want to know.
One person who is an assistant professor says he’s used Twitter as part of his career. It’ll put him right out of business.
It’s not clear whom the new pricing model is targeted at. Nir Grinberg, an assistant professor in the ?Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, used to work at a startup that used Twitter’s data.
Please read the full article. I don’t want to see twitter die, but I don’t know how its going to survive now tht pricing has been given to Wired and people who use the API.
Thumbs down on this news. This might be the nail in the coffin on Twitter. x
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