Twitter has announced three levels of access to its application programming interface (APIs) after announcing that the platform would no longer support free access to its APIs. The three tiers are free, basic and enterprise. The free tier will allow users to post 1,500 tweets a month at no cost. The basic tier is more suitable for students and hobbyists and allows 50,000 post requests and 10,000 read requests per app per month for a subscription fee of $100 per month. The enterprise tier is for businesses and offers managed services, complete streams and access that meets specific needs.
Twitter will discontinue the old access levels, including Standard (for v1.1), Essential and Elevated (for v2) and Premium, in the next 30 days. The decision to end free access to its APIs drew criticism from several tech communities as Twitter APIs have been used in public research works in the field of public health, child safety and national security, among others.
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In response to the criticism, Elon Musk announced that bots producing ‘good’ content will continue to have free API access, but no further details were provided on what bots or content would be considered ‘good’. The changes to the API rules come at a time when Twitter is struggling to cope with the loss of advertisers. In November 2022, 100 top advertisers left the platform within a month of Musk’s takeover. In January, Twitter eased its advertisement policy to allow political ads.
