On February 2, Elon Musk announced that access to the Twitter API would no longer be free for their users who were not paying for enterprise access. Days later, Musk clarified that there would be a very basic free access for those who used it for free and who produced “good content”, which would allow them to create 1,500 tweets a month at most. Also that there would be a basic plan of 100 dollars per monthwith many limitations.
Meanwhile, users of their Premium and Enterprise paid plans they would also face change. Among them, the disappearance of the Premium plan. But until very recently they had no idea how much they would have to pay to continue accessing the API. You already know: it will not be cheap.
Only a few days ago the company began to send customers of its Premium and Enterprise plans the new rates that they will have to pay if they want to continue accessing information from the social network through its API. From now on you can choose between three plans.
Each of them will give them access to a number of tweets and different levels of access, according to Wired. The prices they will have to pay if they want to continue using them they start at no less than $42,000 a month 50 million tweets per access, which means a little more than half a million dollars a year. He Intermediate package will cost $125,000 per month for, among other things, having access to 100 million tweets. As for the most expensive package, will be priced at $210,000 per monthwhich exceeds 2.5 million dollars a year, for 200 million tweets.
Researchers, who until now used basic API access in many cases, will have to contract at least the basic package of these three, something that is highly unlikely to happen in most cases. The budget they would have to pay just to access the API is already well above the budget handled by the research departments of many entities. This price is also prohibitive for most companies. Even for the big ones. Not to mention the higher priced plans.
Therefore, the abandonment of the use of the Twitter API that many researchers, companies and institutions will have to face will not only be detrimental to the research and educational community. Twitter has a crucial data set for understanding how the Internet works and what is being talked about in different regions of the world. Of course, it is very likely that the researchers will find another way to continue accessing this data, other than the one they used now in the social network, as they have done in many cases with the information they obtain from Facebook.
If the price of the basic plan was already very high, those of the superior plans are difficult to face even for large companies. In addition, they offer more limited access than the one that Twitter’s two payment plans have provided until now. Thus, for example, with the basic plan they will only have access to 0.3% of the tweets on the network, while with the free plan in force until now they had access to 1% of the tweets.
This same plan also only allows a maximum of 50,000 queries to be made to the complete archive of tweets. It also limits the number of rules through which the app’s Real Tome PowerTrack API data can be filtered to 25,000. The number of handles, or Twitter usernames, that those who pay for this plan will be able to access will also be limited, up to a maximum of 5,000, and there will be a maximum of 20 requests per minute for the Engagement API Totals Endpoint, which allows researchers to see how tweets behave in terms of interactions.
These prices show that Elon Musk is trying by all means to increase the income of the social network, but it is likely that with this price increase he will achieve the opposite effect, and that not a few users who until now paid to access his API decide to leave to be Twitter customers. Until now, the Premium plan, divided into four levels, had a cost of between $399 and $2,899 per month, so the increase in costs that your customers would have to face is more than important. As for the business plan, it depended on what each one contracted.
This price change is a stick for many companies, but above all, for researchers. Since the company’s launch in 2006, the social network has made it easy for researchers to get data for their research. Only since 2020 there have been more than 17,500 studies and academic reports published What do they use as a source the data of the social network. It is not yet known when the new payment plans for access to the Twitter API will begin to apply. The company has only indicated, vaguely, that within a few months.
