Twitter’s New API Access Tiers: Pricing and Features Compared
Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition, the tech world has been paying close attention to the platform. Its new owner has made dramatic changes that have affected not only users but developers too.After announcing planned changes to its API rules in February, Twitter has officially revealed its new pricing tiers. Each has certain features that you should consider against the needs of your app or service.
Twitter Announces New API Access Tiers
Twitter has formally unveiled its newAPIaccess tiers. Following the announcement, developers can select between three tiers: Free, Basic, and Enterprise. All tiers have limitations, but Enterprise offers more features and has a higher limitation across the board.
In a message posted via the platform’s developer account, Twitter said it would deprecate the existing access tiers (Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium) after 30 days. The only exception is the Ads API, which will be available to everyone at no extra cost.
Additionally, due to the limited nature of the current free tier, Twitter is mulling over ways of serving academic users in the future.
Twitter’s New API Access Tiers
Twitter is replacing its four legacy API access plans with three new tiers. Here’s how they compare.
As the name suggests, this one doesn’t cost a dime. But the Free tier has strict limitations. With this plan, you can post up to 1,500 tweets a month via the API at the application level.
This means the users of your app can collectively send a total of 1,500 tweets using your app each month. Additionally, the Free tier has limited access to tweet posting and media uploads. Variable rate limits will apply across other API endpoints.
Basic goes for $100/month but increases the posting limit per month at the application level to 50,000 tweets. The read limit is capped at 10,000 tweets per month and, for each user, there’s a posting limit of 3,000 tweets per month.
Enterprise
The Enterprise plan doesn’t have a fixed price but, as you’d expect, it offers more functionality and freedom than the other tiers. If you need access to the Enterprise tier, you have to contact Twitter for that.
According to Twitter, Enterprise offers custom plans with “commercial-level access” and “managed services by a dedicated account team”. It also includes access to real-time endpoints (like the Account Activity and Twitter Metrics APIs), and personalized technical support.
Which API Tier Is Right for You?
Of the three tiers, Free is only suitable for learninghow to integrate the API into your app, testing purposes, and small-scale production. With only one app ID, write-only access, and rate limits on the plan, it only makes sense to use it for testing.
The Free tier could be a good fit for some types of bot, but they’d be limited to 50 tweets daily, on average, to avoid hitting the limit.
Once you get some traction, it’s possible to upgrade to the Basic tier for more freedom. While there’s still rate-limited access to specific endpoints, you can have two app IDs and a higher 50,000 posting limit at the app level. This is the perfect plan to scale your app from the Free tier.
The Basic access tier may be the most sensible plan for many, but it still makes it hard to scale your app past 1,000 users because of the low 50,000 tweets posting limit at the app level.
Enterprise is the only suitable plan if you already have an app using Twitter’s legacy API with many users. Though Twitter has not revealed the pricing, it offers more features and can help you continue running your existing application without issues. Plus, unavailable pricing means pricing will vary depending on your needs.
Upgrade to Twitter’s New API Access Tiers ASAP
If you’re a developer with a production app that uses Twitter’s API, you must switch to the new tiers as soon as possible to prevent your app from breaking.
According to Twitter, it will sunset the old access tiers before the end of April, so make the necessary changes as soon as you can for a smooth transition.
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