Twitter's $42,000-a-month API price puts almost everyone off
Tiers start at $500,000 per year for access to 0.3% of a company’s tweets. That's too much for too little data, the researchers say.
Since Twitter launched in 2006, the company has served as the heartbeat of the social media conversation. That's partly because it's where media people go to talk about media, but also because it's willing to open up its back end to researchers. Academics use the free access to Twitter's API, or application programming interface, to access data on the various conversations taking place on the platform, which helps them understand what's being talked about in the online world.
Twitter's API is used by a large number of researchers. Since 2020, more than 17,500 academic papers have been based on data from the platform, adding to Twitter owner Elon Musk's long-held contention that the platform is the "de facto town square."
The new charges included in the filing suggest that most organizations that rely on API access for research will now be priced out of Twitter.
This is the end of a long and complicated process. On February 2, Musk announced that API access would go to the paywall within a week. (Those producing “good” content will be exempt.) A week later, he delayed a decision until Feb. 13. Not surprisingly, that deadline has also been pushed back due to the catastrophic outage Twitter suffered.
According to a document Twitter representatives sent to potential academic clients in early March and passed on to WIRED, the company now offers three levels of enterprise packages for its developer platform. The cheapest Small Package offers access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 per month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets (100 million and 200 million tweets, respectively) and cost $125,000 and $210,000 per month. WIRED confirmed the numbers with other existing free API users who received emails saying the new pricing plans would be in effect within a few months.
“I don’t know if there are any academics on this planet who can afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York — including Twitter.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
For subscribers of the cheapest plan, they can filter data from the app's real-time PowerTrack API with a limit of 25,000 rules and a limit of 50,000 queries with the Full Archive Search API. The number of Twitter handles they can analyze via the Account Activity API will also be limited to 5,000, and the Engagement API Totals endpoint will have a maximum of 20 requests per minute, which allows researchers to see how Tweets are performing in terms of engagement.
While that sounds like a massive dataset, it represents only about 0.3% of Twitter's monthly output, meaning it's far from a comprehensive snapshot of activity on the platform. Twitter's free API access gives researchers access to 1% of all tweets.
Elissa M. Redmiles, a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, said the new prices are mouth-watering. “That’s probably beyond any academic budget I’ve ever heard of,” she said, adding that the price would delay any long-term analysis of user sentiment. "A month's worth of Twitter data isn't really useful for people's purposes," she said.
Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo and co-author of a recent paper analyzing a day in the life of Twitter, said the new pricing effectively killed his career. "$42,000 is not something I can pay for a month in any reasonable way," he said. "It completely ruined any chance I had of doing research in this field, which I've built my career on in many ways."
The pricing document was provided to WIRED by a researcher who requested anonymity because they were still accessing Twitter data through an existing API agreement and feared the agreement could be terminated if they were identified. They said the new cost was "not feasible for academia".
"Nobody can afford it," they said. "Even wealthy institutions can't afford to pay $500,000 a year for tiny amounts of data."
It's unclear who the new pricing model is for. Nir Grinberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, used to work at a startup that used Twitter data.
“It seems like a pretty steep increase for a small amount of data. A few months ago, one percent of Twitter was free. Now Twitter is offering 0.3 percent in commission, which is $500,000 a year,” he said. "It's crazy. Honestly, I don't know who can budget for this."
The researchers say the damage goes beyond academic discussions. Twitter is an important dataset for understanding how the Internet works and the conversations taking place in this conceptual global public square.
Joseph recognizes that he could research other platforms, but notes that Twitter's powerful combination of journalists, senior politicians and business decision makers makes it an important area of study. "Twitter is a special space for understanding elite discourse," he said. "It's a hard pill to take away from all of us trying to use the system to understand it."
However, Blackburn said researchers will continue to find a way to scrutinize what's happening on Twitter. "We've been largely cut off from Facebook for years, but we've been making progress," he said. "Science will not be held hostage by a guy who burned $44 billion on a non-profitable website just to force all users to read his shitty posts."