Twitter has reinstated free API access for verified government accounts and publicly owned services to continue dishing out important updates on weather, transport, or emergency issues.
In a recent tweet, Twitter’s development team revealed the decision of the company to reinstate government and publicly owned services, after it ended free access to its basic API in early February and launched a three-tier paid version.
Announcing this development, it wrote, “One of the most important use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility. Verified gov or publicly owned services who tweet weather, alert, transport updates, and emergency notifications may use the API, for these critical purposes for free.”
Recall that on February 2, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced API access would go behind a paywall. He later launched the increase in the price of Twitter API access last month, with many organizations and developers who had previously been able to access Twitter connectivity for free now being asked to pay $40 k per month for similar access.
The strategy to introduce a paid basic API plan was Musk’s intention to monetize the platform as much as possible. This caused several complaints from government and public service accounts, stating that they were not going to pay for the expensive paid plans.
For instance, New York’s metropolitan transportation authority disclosed that it would stop posting alerts on Twitter after facing a $50,000 per month fee for API access. Also, Microsoft dropped Twitter from its advertising platform, meaning that its users will no longer be able to access their accounts, create and manage tweets.
Just recently, content management and website creation tool WordPress ended its Jetpack plugin for auto-sharing tweets, citing Twitter’s decision to dramatically change the terms and pricing of its API.
Meanwhile, several bigger business apps have already paid in full Twitter’s API access, such as Hootsuite and your Sprout Socials. But it could stop them from offering free plans to their customers, which would have a big impact on their business models.
Analysts have disclosed that the expanded impacts of Musk’s decision to introduce a paid API version aside from cutting off valuable public information services could lead to less reliance on Twitter as a distribution platform, which they feel over time may further impact Twitter’s engagement. They describe Musk’s move as flawed, which is also largely ignorant of how the developer community has facilitated Twitter’s growth.
Musk in defense of the introduction of paid API access disclosed that free API was being abused badly by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. Under his leadership, Twitter is scrambling to control how users around the globe access the platform as it broadens its attempts to monetize the service.