Twitter earlier this year announced multiple changes to its API after prohibiting developers from creating third-party apps with it. Among the changes, the company introduced new paid tiers for the API and a free, write-only version with a number of limitations. Now Twitter has officially shut down its old free API, which has affected many apps and websites across the web.
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Twitter’s free API is officially dead, and so are a lot of other apps
The changes to the Twitter API were announced there in February, but delayed multiple times. During an attempt to roll out the changes to its API in March, the company ended up breaking its own platform. But now it’s official: Twitter’s free API is gone, and it has affected a lot of other apps.
As noted by Chris Messina, the option to log in with Twitter in apps like Post News and Substack is broken due to changes to the API. Engadget reported that many other apps such as Jetpack Social (a WordPress plugin), Echobox, Flipboard, and Social Bearing are also affected.
The new free API only provides 1,500 post requests per month and access to Login with Twitter for each app. To get 50,000 post requests and 10,000 read requests per month, developers must pay $100 per month. Those who need more than that will have to pay for the Enterprise API, which costs $42,000 per month.
But even developers who are willing to pay for the new API are facing issues, as Twitter has cut off access to the old API and is yet to release access to the new paid Enterprise API. “We still have had no response from Twitter’s enterprise sales team and our access to the API was cut off without notice yesterday,” Echobox developers said in a blog post.
Once again, Twitter is leaving developers in the dark after abruptly cutting off access to third-party clients in January.
Twitter’s actions to make more money are not working
Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he has been putting a lot of effort into monetizing the platform somehow. For instance, Twitter has increased the price of the Blue subscription, which now offers a blue badge to paying users. The platform has also been limiting the reach of tweets from non-Blue subscribers.
But Musk’s actions haven’t been showing good results. While he paid $44 billion for Twitter in October, the company is now valued at $20 billion. Due to Twitter’s controversial changes, many big advertisers have left the platform, which has resulted in it losing money.
At the same time, Twitter continues to fire key engineers and executives while the platform faces constant outages, serious bugs, and security breaches. And it doesn’t seem that forcing developers to pay a high price for Twitter’s API will help the company.
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