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Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

developer.twitter.com

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it.

You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#32
post #30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me, the Twitter Blue boost has really led to a general drop in quality. I find that Blue subscribers typically don't say valuable things and are some of the most uninteresting people on the app, and yet they get boosted right to the top.

Agreed, this is a very fair point. I'm also sad at the voices that have been lost one way or another through this transition.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

> Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

You seem to have a really skewed sense of how Twitter's API actually works, and you also seem to be under the incredibly incorrect impression that the API has no rate limiting.

Like most services, Twitter actually saved money by offering a free API with OAuth, because the alternative is for people to use web scrapers and direct access by password, which is orders of magnitude more expensive both due to direct network traffic costs and due to the security costs of people/apps doing insecure things to get around the lack of an API.

> Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore.

This is literally an argument for requiring all Twitter users to pay to use the service, since the official apps all use the same API.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#34

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 $1…

>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).

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#35
post #3

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.

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…

I pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#36
post #24
post #6

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.

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.

My For You tab is excellent. But as to the rest I have to disagree. I get the same number of spam DMs, and I don't see better replies to big accounts. They are real people, but they're tiny follower and accounts who aren't relevant but paid for blue.

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> are you/have you ever been worth over $100b-$200b? If not... how can you sit there and cast judgement as if you actually know anything about what's going on behind the scenes/at his wealth level?... This is such a hilarious fallacy it barely deserves a response. Hope you enjoy spending $8/month on twitter. His decisions have been objectively bad.

[dead]

Re: Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

From a systems engineering point of view you want people hitting an API for programmatic requests. The alternative isn’t “The bots magically go away”, they just get more sophisticated, mix in with and impersonate user traffic, and become impossible to properly rate limit without collateral damage. APIs are for the benefit of the service provider as much as they are for developers.
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