Elon Musk had announced the end of free access to the Twitter API, but not its future price. A document sent by a Twitter representative to college prospects in early March and forwarded to WIRED now offers three tiers of enterprise packages » to access it:
« The cheapest, Small Package, provides access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 per 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. »
Prices deemed totally disproportionate by the academics interviewed by Wired: “ Even wealthy institutions can’t afford to pay half a million a year for a thimble of data ».
Not content with offering prohibitive prices, Twitter would indeed cap the number of requests, only allowing access to 0.3% of Twitter’s monthly production, 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. Honestly, I don’t know who could budget for this. »
Wired notes that the API would have been used to develop nearly 18,000 academic articles since 2020, and that it had become essential for studying the evolution of public opinion, and politics.
