Twitter Says It Will Begin Charging for API Access ⇥ twitter.com
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.
It was only a matter of time before this happened, but it still sucks — and with only a week’s notice. As usual for the new Twitter, there are no details about what this means and no coordination among what is left of its teams — its developer site proudly still says it permits “free access”.
I am obviously not posting about all the changes Twitter is making because they do not excite or interest me, but this one is important. Twitter had generous limits on its free access, though it also charged for more intensive use cases like those of social media scheduling tools. This will impact hundreds of other apps which offer modest Twitter integrations, researchers and academics, and this very website.
I use a plugin on this site to publish posts to its Twitter feed, and it relies on API access. Depending on how much that costs for a tiny use case like my own, I may not find it worthwhile to pay. Posting to Twitter is now reserved for its first-party apps and website, which obviously makes the process more manual. So, no promises.
If you read Pixel Envy by following it on Twitter, I recommend you subscribe to its JSON or RSS feed, or follow the site on Mastodon.
Update: Apparently there will now be a write-only free tier for so-called “good” bots. It is going great, everyone.