Twitter Extorts Social Media Managers

We don’t get much into discussing the daily sagas on online social media channels. But Twitter has now released its “final” API price structure, and it’s a doozy.

The new structure will effectively eliminate many social media managers that simply cannot afford to pay a reportedly whopping $42,000 a month! That is simply ridiculous.

There are two other tiers, with one being free and another costing $100 per month, but neither of these can support the level of tweets a typical social media manager can support.

“The new API offering seems like a money grab,” that’s the way TechCrunch put it. “The free tier provides only 1,500 post requests per month along with access to Login with Twitter. The basic tier — which is deemed ‘for hobbyists or students’ —provides 50,000 post requests and 10,000 read requests per app per month,” the publication said.

Engadget said, “Meanwhile, an enterprise tier is meant for businesses that need a higher level of access, though details for that tier are still murky. According to Twitter’s developer website, the enterprise tier will include ‘commercial-level access that meets your and your customer’s specific needs’ and other features.” Yet the company didn’t say what that may include.

And Wired added, “Tiers will start at $500,000 a year for access to 0.3 percent of the company’s tweets. Researchers say that’s too much for too little data.”

Twitter Moving to API 2.0

The company has said that its current Twitter API will be deprecated within the next 30 days, suggesting many Twitter social media managers will have no choice but to stop using the service.

It is unclear if the $42,000 per month is set-in-stone pricing or if there are other levels of pricing. With less than a month before this new system will be in place, social media managers are scrambling to understand what all of this really means to their business.

If any of this comes true as outlined, many social media managers will probably also have to remove Twitter from its free tiers. While Elon Musk is trying to make Twitter a financial success, it appears his style of managing the service is ad-hock and with little regard to what made Twitter work.

Yes, there needs to be some form of cutting back on bad bots. But effectively eliminating many daily users who utilize the media giant to sell their products or promote a blog doesn’t appear to be the best way moving forward to recoup his investment in the company.

Hopefully, Twitter can figure out a meaningful way to solve this problem in a fair manner, or by the end of April, Twitter may look very different moving forward.

Richard Meldner

Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.

To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.