The situation is clear: Twitter aims to monetize. It so happens that on the very day that Twitter Blue arrives in Italy, the company announces that its API will no longer be usable for free for developers. These will now be called to subscribe to a paid plan.
For those not too accustomed to the tech world, the APIs – acronym for Application Programming Interface – allow third-party developers to implement their own features on the host platform. In this case the host platform, providing access to the API, is Twitter.
Twitter: Access to the API will become paid
With a tweet on its support page, the platform revealed that developers who want to use the API will no longer be able to do so for free. A paid plan will be launched from February 9th.
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 🧵
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023
According to PhoneArena this move represents yet another attempt to Elon Musk to stop the financial disaster facing the company. Further details regarding this new paid plan should arrive next week. However, it is very difficult to predict how many developers will be willing to pay for the service, after many have already given up on Twitter. An example above all is Tweetbot, a historical bot, created via API, decommissioned by the developers. These have preferred to launch a new service on Mastodonwhich in the meantime is welcoming the numerous exiles who have fled from Twitter.
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