Twitter announced on Wednesday that it will no longer allow free access to the Twitter API on February 9, and will subsequently launch a paid version.
The official Twitter developer account said in a tweet: “We’re announcing that starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to v1.1 and v2 versions of the Twitter API, and we will launch a paid base package.
The official Twitter developer account said in a follow-up tweet.
"Twitter has hundreds of millions of users, and the cumulative number of tweets sent has exceeded 1 trillion, with billions of tweets generated each week. Twitter data is one of the most powerful data sets in the world. We are committed to making it fast and fully accessible so that you can work with us to advance and build Twitter. We'll be announcing more details next week."
Twitter began blocking third-party clients in January of this year. Recently, the Developer Agreement was updated to explicitly disallow developers from continuing to develop third-party Twitter applications. The terms explicitly state that developers are not allowed to “create alternative or similar services/products to the Twitter application”.
These third-party Twitter clients may be able to get back up and running with a paid Twitter API. But this certainly increases the operating costs of the third-party clients, which will eventually be passed on to users.
Update: Elon Musk posted a comment about this, saying that it won’t cost more than $100 per month.
