Twitter introduces a new $5,000-per-month API tier

Twitter announced a new API tier today called Twitter API Pro for startups that costs $5,000 per month. The tier gives developers the ability to fetch 1 million tweets per month and post 300,000 tweets per month, and gives them access to the full archive search endpoint.

The Elon Musk–led company announced the new pricing tiers in March. Earlier in the year, Twitter announced that it will shutter access to its free API tier. However, it somewhat walked back that decision by offering 1,500 tweets per month free access for content provider bots.

The new tier sits between the $100 per month basic tier and the $42,000 per month enterprise tier. Twitter is calling this new level suitable for “startups scaling their business.”

When Twitter announced the new pricing, many developers and founders argued that the company should introduce a middle tier between Basic and Enterprise for startups that can’t afford to spend nearly half a million dollars per year.

The new Pro API tier will cater to some of those folks, but won’t solve for businesses who run on tight budgets as they still have to shell out $60,000 per year. For example, this new posting limit of the Pro tier might be sufficient for some of the bots, but it would be tough for developers to raise money through subscriptions or donations to sustain the service for a long time.

Notably, Twitter hasn’t still developed a solution for researchers and academics. In March, the company said that it was “looking at new ways” to serve that community, but the social network hasn’t made any announcement yet.

Recently at an event, Musk said that Twitter was on “the comeback arc” after he took drastic measures to cut costs. Earlier this month, the company hired NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino as CEO of both Twitter and the ambitious “everything app X.”