From 13 February, Twitter is removing free access to their Application Programming Interface (API). They are also removing the paid ‘Premium API’ tier, and will require those who were using this to apply for the higher level paid ‘Enterprise API’ tier.

Twitter will launch new access tiers in their latest bid to monetize their platform. When the API access changes, lots of third-party apps and websites which use it will stop working or will at least have their service interrupted.

Since Twitter first made the public announcement on 2 February, they have now confirmed new access levels, although there remains some confusion after a series of Tweets by the platform owner, Elon Musk, which contradicted part of the original announcements.

There will be the following new tiers:

• ‘Free’ access limited to “1,500 tweets per month for a single authenticated user token”. However, this tier is limited to making and not retrieving tweets, so cannot be used for website feeds or web app integrations.
• ‘Basic’ access at $100 a month, which is limited to “low level API usage and access to Ads API”, to quote Twitter’s official account.
• ‘Pro’ access at $5,000 a month, with much greater usage and access allowances of up to 1,000,000 requests per month.

These changes were announced at short notice and the messaging has been confusing. This, as well as other complications and changes in recent months, may result in developers passing on the cost to their customers, or possibly abandoning integrations and projects altogether. It will likely bring about the end to some of your favourite Twitter tools, features and accounts – which have relied on free and open use of the Twitter API to date.