New Twitter API Tiers
We will offer two access tiers for developers via our website:
Free
For write-only use cases with the Twitter API
- Low rate-limit access to v2 tweet posting and media upload endpoints
- 1,500 Tweets per month posting limit - at the app level
- 1 app ID
- Login with Twitter
- Cost: Free
Basic
For hobbyists & prototypes
- Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints
- 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level
- 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level
- 10,000 Tweets per month read-limit rate cap
- 2 app IDs
- Login with Twitter
- Cost: $100 per month
Going by the stated goal of stoppings bots, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. The write-only tier is free, but you have to pay to read. For the pricing, $100/month is a lot for a hobbyist. It’s reasonable for a paid service that helps you read tweets, but the limits are so low as to be useless. A cap of 10K tweets—not even API calls, tweets—is just too limiting. Twitter really wants you to use their clients.
Just for reference, back in the day when there were like 14 people at Twitter they gave my account a 50,000 req/day limit for free.
They totally disabled access to the V1.1 API (probably because they had no one that could implement these limits on it).
[…]
The sign up link for the Enterprise API, you know the thing that costs $42k/month, is just a Google Form doc…
In the Enterprise sign up form they make it seem like the Enterprise APIs don’t change. The Enterprise API aren’t a superset of the V1.1/V2 API, they’re fairly different and limited in scope.
So what happens to the hundreds of companies who need more access than the crap-o level provides? IFTTT, ZenDesk, Buffer, Block Party, etc…
Feedbin’s Twitter access was revoked because “this App has violated Twitter Rules and policies.” Which is the same message many Twitter clients received in January when Twitter first started turning off API access. […] This means the end of Twitter support in Feedbin.
We’ll have till the end of April, it looks like, before we have to turn off Twitter integration in NetNewsWire.
For Micro.blog, we plan to support cross-posting for a limited number of months, to let folks wind down their use of Twitter. There’s no future on Twitter so all we can do is smooth over the shutdown for customers.
Every developer who built on Twitter has had to make a decision about what to do as their API is changing in the next few days.
Here’s my plan. I’m not going with them. If the API changes break my software, so be it. We had a good run.
Ryan Barrett (via Hacker News):
I’d just like to draw your attention to this page that shows Twitter employees’ posts here on this forum, in chronological order, descending.
Before December, a large number of employees posted here regularly on a wide range of topics. Over the last few months, only a single Twitter employee has posted here consistently, and only about the Ads API.
[…]
I conclude that the Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained. I expect the company will only touch it when they get a misguided edict from the top – for example, the upcoming free API lobotomy. When that happens, I expect it will be done by engineers from the other side of the org, who don’t know the code or systems much or at all, and will probably break more than they “fix.”
Previously:
The overall thrust of the API changes seems to be "Until we can make money from offering an API, nobody else will make money by using the API."