• by Colin Kirkland , May 25, 2023

Twitter has announced a new API (application programming interface) tier called Twitter API Pro that grants startups monthly access to one million retrieved tweets, 300,000 posted tweets and more for $5,000 per month.

“Experiment, build, and scale your business with 1M Tweets per month, including our powerful real-time Filtered/Stream and Full Archive Search endpoints,” Twitter's development team tweeted on Thursday. “We look forward to seeing what you build next!”

The Twitter API Pro plan fills the gap between the company's Basic plan for $100 per month, and the $42,000 per month Enterprise tier.

From the dev-team tweet above, it looks like the Pro plan will give startups access to endpoints for real-time filtered streams, an archive search of old tweets in addition to the millions of retrieved and posted tweets.

However, it is worth wondering how many startups will be able to afford $60,000 per year, which poses a sizable leap from the Basic tier that is only $1,200 per year, potentially leaving out some users with tighter budgets, like small startups, researchers and academics.

“This new posting limit of the Pro tier might be sufficient for some of the bots, but it would be tough for developers to raise money through subscriptions or donations to sustain the service for a long time,” noted TechCrunch.

Many developers are skeptical of Twitter’s recent API changes, which have done away with most third-party clients via the quiet addition of new “restrictions” in the company’s developer agreement. Twitter also received widespread flack after denying developers free API access this past February.