Thanos came - The twitter API story

To start with, this article doesn't have much to do with the popular Avengers infinity wars movie (I highly recommend it if you've not seen it). The article’s title only hopes to draw a comparison between how Thanos (the major villain in the movie) gathered the infinity stones to decimate half of all life in the Universe to bring balance and how Elon Musk (our Thanos in this case) is trying to get rid (reduce might be a better word to use) of spam bots on Twitter and what it means for you as a developer trying to build on the Twitter API. On April 14, 2022, Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of Twitter and concluded the acquisition on October 27, 2022. One of Elon Musk's reasons for buying Twitter according to his personal Twitter account was to get rid of spam bots and it is of little surprise that one of the steps he's taken since he acquired the company has been to restrict the use of the Twitter API. In this article, I'm going to highlight what the Twitter API was like prior to Thanos (Elon) coming, the new restrictions introduced by Thanos and what this means for you as a developer looking to build with the Twitter API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. The Twitter API is like a special code language that Twitter shares with other people who want to make those cool apps and automate stuff like creating tweets, responding to tweets, DMs, logging in using Twitter functionality and a whole lot more on Twitter.

Before Elon Musk's acquisition, the Twitter API was pretty much very open and straightforward, you just had to ensure your mobile number and email are verified and you got access to the Essential access immediately, the essential access allows you to retrieve about 500k tweets per month, manage tweets and also search for tweets within the last 7 days. To get access to a superior access level, the elevated access, you'd only have to write a use case review of what you're trying to build with the Twitter API and boom, you'd get the elevated access, twitter elevated access allows you to search up to 2 million tweets per month (which is a whole lot). There was also the enterprise access level (there still is) which is the highest level of access and it offers the highest level of access to businesses who depend on Twitter data. For a hobbyist developer like me who builds projects for fun, the essential access and elevated access were enough for what I wanted to build and I was having fun with the Twitter API, even had a whole lot of other ideas I was trying to build - I currently own one of the biggest screenshot bots on Twitter and I had even started building a video downloader bot whilst having plans on writing articles on how to build with the API.

After the acquisition of the Twitter API was announced, I and probably a lot of other Twitter developers were waiting for the ideas Elon had on how to get rid of spam bots without affecting the good bots. There are a lot of good bots on Twitter which makes the Twitter experience a whole lot more fun - video downloader bots, reminder bots, screenshot bots and a whole lot more. So on February 2nd, 2023, the Twitter dev account announced that they will no longer support free access to the Twitter API and according to them "instead a paid basic tier will be available". On 30th of March 2023, they announced the new API access levels which included free access, and basic access for hobbyists (costs $100/month) and the previous enterprise access still stands. Last month, on the 25th of May, they also announced a new access level (the Twitter API pro) which costs $5000 per month.

The free access allows developers to create tweets (with a limit of 1500 tweets per month), build login to Twitter functionality on your apps and lookup users only, so if your project involves retrieving tweets from Twitter you have to try a higher access level. Basic access provides you with a lot more like looking up tweets, managing tweets, timelines, searching tweets, looking up users, spaces, direct messages and some more. The issue with the basic access is that you have a tweets retrieval limit of 10k tweets per month, and for an access level that costs $100 per month, I don't think it is worth it. The other new access level, the Twitter Pro, costs $5000 per month and it offers the same ability as the basic access levels just that there are lesser rate limits; You can retrieve up to 1 million tweets per month, and a lot of the other rate limit for each functionality in the basic access is a lot more improved in the pro access.

Now to answer the question, ’ Is it worth it paying for these access levels?’ Well, it depends. If your idea or project earns more than the payment required for your access level, then it's absolutely fine. However, for a hobbyist developer like me who doesn't earn actively from my Twitter bots, then it's an emphatic NO!

How have these projects impacted the Twitter developer community? A lot of Twitter bots have had to shut down, and some developers have had to sell their products to bigger companies who can afford to pay for the access levels. Although not all Twitter bots have been affected yet because it seems Twitter is introducing the new API access level in batches, it's only a matter of time!

Advice for anyone looking to build on the Twitter API or any other popular API?

You should know that you don't have full control of your products, the company could introduce new access levels (like in the case of Twitter) or rules that could lead to the shutdown of your product.

Twitter is still a good platform to build on because of the large number of users it has, but these new limits make things difficult. I hope in the near future, the API access levels will be cheaper.

Thanks for reading!