Gnip is Twitter's enterprise API business with annual subscriptions to firehose and decahose access. This is month-to-month billing for improved API access and data quality.
It took huge amounts of effort to get them to return our inquiries. Given the huge amount of money we ended up spending that seemed ridiculous.
But I guess that just got us ready for the whole "everyone must move to Gnip 2.0, but no we won't merge the multiple pull requests to make our official client work with our new API"[1] thing. Wow, that was fun...
Mastodon is coming for Twitter.