Twitter API Pricing

and why it's $42,000 a month

Welcome to the new segment of Category Surfers where we break down go-to-market strategies so you can build the best GTM engine for your company.

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Twitter API Pricing

Just last week, Musk’s company released a controversial pricing plan for Twitter API with a free, $100-a-month plan and a $42,000-a-month tier.

Twitter API pricing page

I think now they made some changes because can’t find any official info regarding that 42k price point.

Even if this 42k plan is real — it’s not as bad as people think…

Basic plan

Let’s start with the $100/mo plan. This plan aims to get users to pay for testing their app. It’s standard practice for dev-focused pricing to give away some light testing features for free and then get companies building on the API to buy a bigger testing plan for a flat $100-$500 monthly fee.

Here is Merge API’s pricing for example. They have a free plan that you can pay up to $650 a month for some add-ons and they have product plans with (probably) negotiated terms and limits for built apps.

The "Launch" plan starts for free and then you pay for production accounts

Enterprise plan

Here comes the big boy. Reportedly starts at $42,000 a month. This was the most hated part by the indie makers’ community on Twitter.

Because that meant their products would die as no one would drop a monthly mortgage payment for this beautiful house on API access.

Right now, I can’t check the current pricing — the button on the website leads to a Google Form. But my assumption is that they are selling custom plans with some usage tiers behind the scenes.

Maybe Twitter doesn’t want indie companies building on top of them. The change of ownership might mean that they will simply build their own add-ons and improve the product (like most companies).

And the price strategy could be a place to start while still leaving room for bottom-line impact (revenue) from the social media scheduling companies that have 42k to spend on an API.

Then that weird pricing makes sense.

My research shows that about 46% of API users are SMBs, 46% are mid-market companies and 8% are enterprise companies. This new pricing would mean losing 46% of low-paying API users.

That’s it for this week.

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