Elon Musk announced the end of free access to the Twitter API, but not about its future price. A document sent by a Twitter spokesperson to potential college applicants in early March and forwarded to WIRED now offers “three tiers of corporate packages” to access:
“The cheapest, Small Package, gives you access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers allow researchers or businesses to access larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets, respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 per month. »
Scholars interviewed by Wired found the rates completely disproportionate: “Even wealthy institutions can’t afford to pay half a million a year for a thimble of data.”
Not content with offering exorbitant prices, Twitter will indeed limit requests, allowing access to only 0.3% of Twitter’s monthly output, Wired calculated:
“A few months ago, 1% of Twitter was free. Now Twitter is offering 0.3% for half a million dollars [par an]. It’s just crazy. To be honest, I don’t know who could budget for this. »
Wired notes that since 2020, the API has been used to develop nearly 18,000 academic articles and that it has become essential for studying the evolution of public and political opinion.