Twitter says startups can “experiment” with their data for $5,000 a month

The Twitter API roller coaster continues under the leadership of Elon Musk. company announce New “Professional” category for developers today. At $5,000 per month, it falls between the $100 per month and custom-priced Enterprise plans.

The new Twitter API Pro plan provides monthly access to 1 million tweets retrieved and 300,000 tweets published at the app level. It also includes limited access to endpoints for real-time filtered streams (direct access to tweets based on specific criteria) and full archive search for historical tweets. Finally, it adds three App IDs and logs in with Twitter Access.

However, the $5,000/mo. Pricing for companies that want to ‘Experiment, Build and Scale’ [their] business” leaves a massive gap between it and $100/month. Basic plan, next level down. The latter offers only a fraction of the access on the Pro plan, leaving small businesses to choose between a tier that may not provide enough for a $100 monthly fee versus the 5000 plan. Dollars exceed the budgets of many startups.

Some users also thought its limitations were too narrow for this price. “That’s cool, but you’ve really killed most Twitter apps by now,” Birdy developer Maxime Dupré said answered for a Twitter ad. “And 5K is still too much for most of us. A 1K plan could make sense…but then again, it’s too late.” Pricing is also unlikely to be beneficial to researchers, to whom the platform is trying to charge tens of thousands of dollars for access.

Twitter’s recent API changes have created a bumpy road for developers who still want access to company data. First, the company effectively killed off most of its third-party customers in January before quietly updating its terms to reflect the change. Then, in February, it announced that it would end free API access, only to delay the move after widespread backlash with the promise that a new, read-only copy of the free tier would still be available for “testing” purposes. (The old version of the free API was cut entirely in April, though Twitter re-enabled it for emergency services in May.) The platform rolled out the initial three tiers of the new API (free, core, and enterprise) in March before adding $5,000 to pros today. class. However, since the company has already alienated many developers who previously relied on its platform, it remains to be seen how effective it will be in attracting new customers — especially small operations — to the expensive new plan.