Towards the end of March 2023, Twitter announced the pricing plans for its APIs. Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, developers could access and create APIs with Twitter and use them with the platform for free, but that changed when the company revealed that it will require developers to sign up for a paid tier to access the API. This has caused chaos among the thousands of developers who relied on its developer tools. The company had initially announced that access would be cut off in early February, but then postponed the move without giving any further updates. It appears that the company has now started cutting off the developers relying on its free tools.
Over the last few days, several app makers and other services have reported that the Twitter API is no longer functioning, with many struggling to understand the changes as Twitter has provided very little communication on the issue. Mashable has reported that the shutoff seems to have started on Tuesday morning. Twitter’s lack of communication is further complicated by the fact that most of the employees who worked in developer relations were laid off during the company’s recent mass layoffs.
The discontinuation of Twitter‘s free API has affected apps and websites that used Twitter’s API to enable content sharing to and from Twitter. For example, WordPress reported on Tuesday that it could no longer access the API, rendering its websites unable to automatically share posts to Twitter. Many of Twitter’s bot developers have also been impacted, with the maker of “Cheap Bots Done Quick” receiving a notice that they were cut off from the API. Although Twitter’s new “basic” tier is meant to provide a pathway to allow bots to continue, many developers have said the monthly limit of 1,500 tweets is too constrained.
As pricing for higher-level enterprise tiers remains hidden, it is still unclear how many developers will be able to continue using Twitter’s API in some form. Rumors have suggested that the “enterprise” level could cost $40,000 a month or more, which may be too costly for many developers. Despite this uncertainty, some developers have already decided to close down their services due to the changes, with the developer of Social Bearing, an analytics service used by researchers, tweeting that there was no way the service could continue to run.
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(Via)
