New Twitter API pricing starts at $42,000 per month | Hacker News Reader

New Twitter API pricing starts at $42,000 per month

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"World's (almost) richest person consistently sets prices using 420 and 69 because weed and sex are funny" is just so dumb.

...or FUNNY!

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of his favorite books. The 420 is a reference to “42”being the answer to the meaning of life. Nothing to do with weed.

even if you had a source for Musk saying this, I'd doubt it would be the real reason. 420 is a reference to weed, not to "42" of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

He made references to 42 long before 420 ever came up. Certainly long before the weed smoking Joe Rogan episode.

The 420 joke is a reference to his tweets trying to take Tesla private. 42 wasn’t in the right range as a target price. But 420 was. And since this tweet turned out a debacle, he now uses that number. It’s like 42 squared. Or rather, an order of magnitude better than 42.

If you don’t get the joke and rather want to believe he has some weird connection to the weed subculture, feel free.

With those prices it might be cheaper to reverse engineer regular Twitter API used by their web interface and Nitter.

It's always cheaper, but it breaks theirs terms of service, and they may block you at any time. Not something any business will take lightly.

At that point, maybe businesses will stop caring. Especially in an era of cost cutting.

For the price Twitter is asking you could hire a team full time to maintain a scraper.

Well, one junior anyways...

Given how arbitrary their own decisions are (including breaching their own rental and other contractual agreements) i'd say its even odds.

Alternatively, create a business that wraps Twitter's public data/API and sell access to your API starting at $99/month. A sort of.... API arbitrage?

Surely you'd just immediately get sued into oblivion (unless musk fired all the lawyers too...)

I vaguely remember a court case that found "internet scraping" to be legal activity.

Why wouldnt it be legal in this instance?

It's gone both ways. In the late 90's, I was a co-founder of Ruby Lane and we had an agreement with eBay to spider their site and they paid us for traffic. When they decided to end the contract, we removed them from our search engine.

But later, eBay successfully sued Bidder's Edge to prevent them from spidering eBay's site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge

Courts in later cases have disagreed with this ruling.

The bigger issue IMO is that it can get pretty hard to spider a site if they are actively trying to prevent you from doing it. It turns into a not-so-fun game of cat and mouse.

Great news! Hopefully this will make most services drop out of Twitter

What did it previously cost before this change?

IIRC it was $99/month and increased based on number of requests. I can't figure out where that was listed to check using the Internet Archive.

ok, so safe to say then that this is a calculated way of removing third party services from their platform?

There were many tiers, but it did go up into the 5 figures for large volumes.

An old screenshot of the dashboard from Twitter Community: https://global.discourse-cdn.com/twitter/original/3X/b/4/b42..., https://twittercommunity.com/t/api-pricing-its-very-dark-out...

$99/mo. for 100 requests, $1,899/mo. for 2,500 requests.

> 1 request is 30 days worth of tweets, or 500 tweets, whichever is first

There were no official prices on the twitter pages for the search endpoints and the powertrack apis. I tried to inquire and that is when I found out about the pricing changes (I am @blackforestboi on Twitter). There were some prices mentioned about the Account Activity API which were also quite pricey already. I think something like $2500 to follow updates of 500 accounts or so.

The key difference is that most APIs consumers and projects used were the v1.1 and v2 apis which were free to use with rate limits that were actually quite generous. (tweets, timelines, messages, bookmarks, lists, followers etc)

Now those APIs are all behind that enterprise paywall with that entry price of $42.000

Probably mostly targeting financial services companies with those prices.

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