Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

[sickcodebruh]

$100/month strikes me as a “we don’t want you” price. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can justify it but it will immediately turn away a hell of a lot of people. Maybe this was the point? Reduce API users to only the most motivated people/organizations and expect that many of them will grow into the next tier?

[UberFly]

Seems like there should be a few more tiers, but the posting rate one needs to require the $100 tier lends that the platform is becoming a core part of your business, etc. Maybe it'll slow some of the bot trolls. etc too.

[LapsangGuzzler]

Totally agree, this reads as "go enterprise or GTFO"

[VWWHFSfQ]

I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear.

[herbst]

Twitter and their V1 api was one of the reasons I fell in love with programming and automation.

Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month!

It's sad.

[ThorsBane]

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained.

Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special student pricing for student hobbyists. Aren't they also still doing a free option that's reasonable for testing out the api?

[willio58]

The shear amount of floundering that twitter has done since Elon bought it is hilarious as a non-user. I do feel bad for the people who just like using twitter though, like every other week the checkmark means something different. I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now. Elon really knows how to shake up a company! And by shake up I mean destroy one step at a time.

[spaceman_2020]

For quite some time, crypto scams and fake airdrops were literally showing up under sponsored posts. There was a big (real) Arbitrum airdrop and for for days, I would see ads for a (fake) airdrop.

[giobox]

While I think the app and service has gotten much worse in several ways post-Elon, I do see way less crypto spam than before FWIW. The "For You" tab now actually sometimes even surfaces tweets I'm interested in too now.

Performance and general stability has absolutely fallen for me though, and the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter was a technical embarrassment/disaster as far as I could tell.

[WalterBright]

> The shear amount of floundering

On the other hand, this looks to me like trying all sorts of things to see what will work.

[matsemann]

Most annoying thing is blue checks being boosted to the top of every thread. Especially since most blues in my replies are either scams or harassment. So I just hide all blues and tell them to pay me $8 to be visible, lol.

[rejectfinite]

For me, it's better.

They removed the annoying login pop-up.

I only interact with twitter using links from other platforms. I don't use the trending hashtags or search.

So for me, it's been better since Elon took over.

[snickerbockers]

>I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now

Wasn't that already a problem before he took over? I seem to recall Joe Biden hawking some crypto scam after Twitter's admin got catfished into giving a third party access to his account.

[olalonde]

He cut Twitter's expenses significantly while avoiding reliability issues (a feat that debunked several predictions by tech "experts" on HN about potential major outages) and while adding several new useful features. Admittedly, his decision to unban several controversial figures was debatable from a business standpoint, at least in the short term. However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, based on principles rather than profits.

Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.

[abeppu]

Do they _want_ people to use it, or is this pricing specifically to get people to not use the API without having to actually announce they're killing it? They can let the API decay and this pricing will mean that its decline will be visible and relevant to far fewer people.

[kramerger]

That's a lot of money for a service that currently has single-nine availability.

[spaceman_2020]

I don’t want to scrape, but at these price points, small projects where I only need basic user profile data are simply more cost effective with scraping.

Some very dumb decisions with their API pricing. How do you go from $0 to $100 to $5,000?

[herbst]

When scraping with good expensive proxies is effectively cheaper than using the API the company is doing something wrong

[tracker1]

The site doesn't mention how many profile lookups are allowed per month at the given tiers... how many user profiles are you looking up? Does this include tweets/retweets?

As for the pricing, it's likely they really don't want anyone unlikely to hit the upper tier to even try developing against their APIs to begin with.

[methodical]

I can't be the only person who noticed the double space in the first bullet point...

Anyways, while I understand wanting to monetize their API instead of having it just be used by tons of people for free, the tiers here just seem like insanity. This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model. $100 for a hobbyist? I personally can't remember the last time I paid $100 on a monthly basis for any non-essential service that I was using as a hobby. Would be interested to see the amount of customers each one of these tiers was actually fielding...

[sebzim4500]

>This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model.

Why 'few instances'? I'd always prefer an API to be pay per request. It's my favourite thing about OpenAI (if you ignore the fact that big players can get access to the base model through Azure).

[system16]

The "Use Cases" they list are hilariously vague and devoid of content.

[grouchomarx]

"build for fun" indie musician paying $100/mo for twitter

[Balgair]

Aside: Elon's got this all wrong. The checkmarks and other pricing tiers only weed out the dupes and conmen.

Traditionally, a list of people that are dumb enough to do really dumb things and that have disposable income is very valuable. Having a list of known rubes isn't something you share, for free, to anyone. You charge a lot of money for that list, usually.

But here's Elon, just giving away that list for anyone to see.

[somethoughts]

Could this actually be a good thing for the Twitter bot problem?

Are re-tweets/likes considered a tweet in the tweet limits?

I'm not a heavy Twitter user or developer just a curious bystander and definitely don't have details into the "buy retweets" ecosystem so not sure if the "buy retweets"/buy social cred were using this type of API, humans or webscraping type scripts.

[dirtyid]

Hopefully this means feedly pro can support twitter integration again. In mean time, anyway aware of working method to turn tweets from a public list into a daily email digest? A couple methods I use to depend on died with API access gone. Or any app that reads a twitter list via TTS.

[joatmon-snoo]

A whopping additional app ID for the low, low price of an additional $4900/mo!

[chatmasta]

This seems like a good way to create a gray market of "unofficial" Twitter "API" providers that charge $100 per month to automate Twitter with reverse engineered mobile API endpoints.

[Devasta]

What surprises me most is that Twitter doesn't appear to have anything that allows you post ads only to Twitter Blue subscribers.

They are a set of users comprised almost entirely of absolute morons who believe everything they read online and also have money to spend on stupid buillshit like Twitter Blue, they are a goldmine for advertisers and this oppurtunity to bilk them of all their cash is just wasted.

[crossroadsguy]

I would be curious to see whether developers fall in line or have learned from the past.

[kgwxd]

This is for people than need to flow money to Elon under the guise of a valid business transaction.

[theprincess]

I'm curious to know what sorts of things you were thinking about when you wrote this. The tone of it reads as emotional and defensive rather than informative. It would probably contribute more to the discussion if you expressed your own ideas rather than attempting to pre-empt the ideas of others by listing them in bullet point format. Wouldn't you agree? :3

[tmpz22]

Effort spent on lower tiers takes away from higher tiers that make actual amounts of money for twitter.

They don't want the $10/mo student because realistically that student is only going to be a drain on Twitter.

They want the $100/mo "amateur" who has an actual shot at growing to a $1000/mo or beyond tier. If they don't blow up they want that user to stop paying and being a net-drain on Twitter's constrained and expensive (man-hours) resources.

Further they want to price out some bad actors. See cheating differential in free vs. paid games.

Look I disagree strong with Twitter's direction and leadership - but this pricing ain't the hill to die on.

[kstrauser]

Except without those free accounts, the others have no value. Who's going to spend $5000/month so they can talk to only other people who pay $5000/month?