Because it's worth that much. I didn't even give it any thought – I just hit the purchase button the moment I read I could.
They shouldn't have written this with the sheepish, question-marked headline. They don't need to apologize or feel bashful, though I get why they would. It's a great desktop app. It costs what it costs. Anyone who doesn't like that is just leaving more tokens for the rest of us.
One explanation: not all users are created equal. It could be that the 20% who use third party clients are more/most engaged. Lassoing them back into the fold could have some strategic benefit.
Charge per 10k tokens or something, with the first 100k free. Make each token worth about $0.60 and you could make some serious dough via not just 3rd party clients, but also people trying to mine data, build on top of the platform etc. etc.
Even if every single Mac user would pay Twitter a one time fee of $100 to use a third party Twitter client, that would result in just $5 billion.
I think Twitter is betting they can earn more by controlling the experience.
I wish there were a way of identifying people like you online and charging more to capture some of that consumer surplus :)
Unless you price it so highly that only one person in the world will pay for it, you're leaving consumer surplus on the table. Clearly that's not a good solution though, since you miss out on all the slightly more price sensitive customers.
No, it's $20 because they decided to price it at $20, and they decided to price it at $20 for the reasons they stated.