Twitter to ditch free API access: developers react

Musk's motives questioned as Twitter suddenly announces access must be paid for

Twitter is removing free tier access to its API, which will kill off thousands of small apps and could affect research activities.

On Thursday, the company announced without warning that from 9th February, free access to its API would be cut off. Instead, developers who use the API would have to pay for a "paid basic tier".

The announcement, made via a tweet from the @TwitterDev account, made no mention of the price of the basic paid tier, but premium access currently starts at $99 per month.

The change will mainly affect small bot developers who make little or no money from their projects, using the API to access content on Twitter or to automatically post pictures, weather updates, and other feed-generated content. It could also affect services like Bot Sentinel which uses machine learning to identify and flag probable bots and troublesome accounts.

Apps that help people migrate away from Twitter, like Movetodon which allows users to find and follow their Twitter contacts on Mastodon, will cease to work.

The likely motive for the sudden move is that Twitter needs to generate cash, and fast, to meet obligations to its creditors. But it has been met with dismay from many quarters, including academia. Giuliano Formisano, a data scientist from Oxford who uses Twitter data for social science studies, said he feared for continued access.

Twitter was one of the first social media sites to allow free access via an API. Development and security research duo Mysk lamented the loss of a valuable learning resource.

"I learned REST API and OAuth from Twitter API. I was a student and couldn't afford $100/month." they said. "Sad that this great learning tool won't be as accessible to curious humans, because of bots."

Others pondered darker motives, wondering if the mercurial Musk's real plans are to run the site into the ground. Many said they would no longer be able to keep running their apps, or would port them to an alternative social media platform like Mastodon.

The response of Jason Weiser, a podcaster and developer of a free Twitter bot, was typical.

"I have an active bot with 40k followers I'm going to let die because I won't monetize it. It's a hobby. I would imagine others like me will let theirs die, too," he said on Mastodon. "I would like to believe that the current Twitter management is just bad at this, but it does seem like they are actively trying to kill their own platform."

Stefan Bohacek, creator of Botwiki, a site that preserves examples of creative online bots and provides and tutorials on how to make them, said in a blog post: "I do understand that folks have spent years creating and curating their network over on Twitter, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the platform has no future ahead of itself, and its new owner is fully set on running it into the ground."

Molly White, curator of the popular Web3 is Going Just Great blog said: "[I] wonder how much of the choice to cut off free API access was motivated by the desire to shut down mastodon/etc crossposters?"

The API is not the only way

The official API is not the only way to grab content from Twitter and some may resort to data scraping as a quick-and-dirty stopgap solution, which could actually put more pressure on Twitter's servers.

Others may be able to make use of Twitter's OAuth API, but what part that feature, which allows users to access third party accounts with their Twitter login, plays in Musk's plans is unclear.

Zedeus, developer of the alternative Twitter front end Nitter, said there are other workarounds.

"It's very unlikely Nitter will be affected since the APIs aren't used in the official way with developer credentials. I'm slowly moving stuff to use their newer GraphQL APIs anyway, so if it breaks it'll be fixed soon-ish."