In another attempt to squeeze money from his newly acquired platform, Elon Musk has proposed introducing a tiered subscription service for Twitter’s API, which is used as an access point for many apps, bot accounts and other tools to function.
A Tweet from @TwitterDev said on February 2nd: “Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, bot v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.”
Musk himself offered more insight by saying: “Yeah, free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers and opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things.”
“Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”
As you can imagine, this hasn’t been taken well. One reply said: “Charging developers for creating features for your own product? Lol you should be paying them.”
As Social Media Today put it: “That means that a heap of Twitter analytics apps, management tools, schedulers, automated updates – a range of key info and insight options will soon cease to function. Which seems like the sort of thing that, if you were Twitter, you’d want to keep on your app.”
