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For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained. Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special student pricing for student hobbyists. Aren't they also still doing a free option that's reasonable for testing out the api?

wpm 3y ago
I pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".
- tracker1 3y ago
  That is more likely the case here. They don't see profit from their side to make lower level access between the free and $100/mo tier as worth it... and would rather see corporate backed developers who are likely to have 5+ figure annual contracts than deal with tens of thousands of $10-20/mo subscribers disproportionally using the system.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.
- ThorsBane 3y ago
  Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.
  - d4mi3n 3y ago
    This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it. You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      I honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.
      - tracker1 3y ago
        I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.
        spaceman_2020 3y ago
        Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually. These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want. Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.
        3y ago
WesternWind 3y ago
Then they could provide it for a year, or six months, or one month. twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers. twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.
herbst 3y ago
Those $100 would have been barely enough for testing some things. That's more than my spending limit has been as 13yo. Sure I get what you mean, and I couldn't care less about today's twitter. But it still makes me sad to know that in today's work. 13yo me without PayPal or credit card wouldn't have any of that fun. And I imagine millions of people can't either.
chimeracoder 3y ago
> That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever. They did, for most of Twitter's history > ...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! On the contrary, the free availability of the Twitter API is inarguably what drove the growth of Twitter as a platform. Twitter benefited far more from it than the low marginal costs of operation. It's not even close.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
The $100/mo API has extremely shit limits on top of being prohibitively expensive for prototyping. This will kill the mere idea of building anything on Twitter's API. Low friction and upfront costs are important for hobby projects and experimental prototypes. In this day and age it's expected that companies have generous free tiers for hobby/prototype usage, and it makes sense because it usually costs them pennies to provide it. Serving API requests is extremely cheap and the volume is almost always going to be so insignificant that they wouldn't even be able to tell if developers are using the API if not for API keys.
dividedbyzero 3y ago
> Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.
abeppu 3y ago
> they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads. I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%. Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today: - write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s). - interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day? - interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits. An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.

wpm 3y ago

I pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".

tracker1 3y ago
That is more likely the case here. They don't see profit from their side to make lower level access between the free and $100/mo tier as worth it... and would rather see corporate backed developers who are likely to have 5+ figure annual contracts than deal with tens of thousands of $10-20/mo subscribers disproportionally using the system.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

ThorsBane 3y ago
Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.
- d4mi3n 3y ago
  This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it. You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.
      - spaceman_2020 3y ago
        Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually. These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want. Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.
        3y ago

WesternWind 3y ago

Then they could provide it for a year, or six months, or one month. twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers. twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.

herbst 3y ago

Those $100 would have been barely enough for testing some things. That's more than my spending limit has been as 13yo. Sure I get what you mean, and I couldn't care less about today's twitter. But it still makes me sad to know that in today's work. 13yo me without PayPal or credit card wouldn't have any of that fun. And I imagine millions of people can't either.

chimeracoder 3y ago

> That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever. They did, for most of Twitter's history > ...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! On the contrary, the free availability of the Twitter API is inarguably what drove the growth of Twitter as a platform. Twitter benefited far more from it than the low marginal costs of operation. It's not even close.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

The $100/mo API has extremely shit limits on top of being prohibitively expensive for prototyping. This will kill the mere idea of building anything on Twitter's API. Low friction and upfront costs are important for hobby projects and experimental prototypes. In this day and age it's expected that companies have generous free tiers for hobby/prototype usage, and it makes sense because it usually costs them pennies to provide it. Serving API requests is extremely cheap and the volume is almost always going to be so insignificant that they wouldn't even be able to tell if developers are using the API if not for API keys.

dividedbyzero 3y ago

> Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.

abeppu 3y ago

> they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads. I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%. Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today: - write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s). - interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day? - interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits. An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.