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Hi,

The original post says “Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or feedback,”. This Thread is for that, as you can not reply to the original thread.

Increasing the Basic Pricing from $100 to $200 p/m, while also only allowing now JUST ONE top-up is extremely concerning. It prevents businesses from scaling up properly-cost wise, and now it’s even more expensive for just 10K posts.

If the Top-Ups count was the same for Basic Tier, this wouldn’t be as bad - but now it means people can not easily progress on to the Pro Tier as scaling up (costs-wise) would be more difficult due to lack of top-ups.

Please kindly reconsider this.

Suggested Improvements:

  • Keep Top-Ups the same as they were previously for Basic Tier

  • As @gmcconnaughey says,
    suggested improvement: Switch to entirely usage-based billing and per-user rate limits. That way our monthly payment to X grows with our monthly usage, and we can both prosper together. As things are today, there is no way we can make the jump between tiers when the time comes, because the economics and app-based limits simply don’t work.

@XDevelopers @sadev23 @taycaldwell Any thoughts on this? Why is X now increasing the price for Basic? This makes it harder for people. And $200 for extremely low rate limits, only 10K posts per month, no ticket-based support, outdated & vague documentation and no new features makes it almost impossible to scale or even consider purchasing, and costs already WAY more than most APIs out there.

And when will these changes take effect?

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I like this part in particular:

We are constantly working on improving our API offerings for developers and will be making the following changes:

Not sure how doubling the cost of existing functionality without adding any new functionality improves anything.

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It’s a disgrace. They’ve just made this API even worse.

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Thanks for creating this thread. The original post says “Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or feedback,” but they don’t actually tell you where to reach out with questions/feedback, so hopefully X staff will read this.

The removal of multiple top ups (which just 7 months ago they proudly announced!) is extremely detrimental to us. The jumps between tiers are way too high for small startups like mine.

My suggested improvement: Switch to entirely usage-based billing and per-user rate limits. That way our monthly payment to X grows with our monthly usage, and we can both prosper together. As things are today, there is no way we can make the jump between tiers when the time comes, because the economics and app-based limits simply don’t work.

At the very least restore top ups, which, if nothing else, acted like short-term usage-based pricing for small companies like ours.

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I STRONGLY Recommend this instead, esspecially considering this is how THE MAJORITY of other APIs out there deal with this. @XDevelopers

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I’ve wrote a blog post about the tiers more than a year ago. I made an analogy between X tiers and airline tickets.

  • Free tier: You carry your own suitcases and walk on the ground following the airplane’s route = utterly useless, even grandma hits the limits
  • Basic: You attach the suitcases to your body and hand off the wheels while the plane is flying = still completely useless
  • Pro: First class. I wouldn’t say pampered, because the rate limits are still pathetic though
  • Enterprise: you rent out the whole plane, even Microsoft gave the middle finger to that

What is needed is something in between the Basic and the Pro in price (I was thinking ~$250/mo at that time), but with the rate limits of the Pro, and adjust all rate limits. Back in the day I predicted that everyone will have to turn to scraping due to the unreasonable pricing, then - surprise surprise - Twitter received record amount of scraping traffic which Elon Musk thought were only the Generative AI training data scraper bots. The login wall cut out those who don’t have enough audacity or resources to farm accounts for the scraping.

Instead of exercising some more common sense and leniency, and adjusting the limits and pricing, the trend still points to the wrong direction. This latest change literally doubles down (raises the Basic monthly from $100 to $200), puts more limitations in place on top of that. I wanted to spend extra money but couldn’t get hold of any sales person.

As far as I know we still cannot query the monthly cap or top it off (correct me if I’m wrong):

Or do thing like getting the tags from an image via an API. How to get tags of a media in a Tweet - #4 by IgorBrigadir Make media tags accessible via API · Issue #34 · xdevplatform/open-evolution · GitHub Scraping at least could solve that problem (while it was feasible).

I’m writing this maybe as an eulogy? Twitter is a great platform and it’ll take many more years to get to game over, but the direction points there.

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“We are constantly working on improving our API offerings for developers and will be making the following changes”. For example, we will ‘improve’ free tier by reducing the monthly tweet limit from 1500 to 500, or by charging more for basic tier without adding any functionality. The joke tells itself…

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@XDevelopers @sadev23 @taycaldwell I know you guys probably don’t have control over the pricing changes, but can you please provide some insight / thoughts on this situation, and maybe discuss how the new annual plan will work in terms of Post Caps and Top-Ups

It would be a good compromise if the annual plan was purchased, the post cap would only apply on a per-yearly basis instead of a per-month basis (so 120K per year, instead of 10K per month, only if the annual plan is purchased), and allow a Top-Up of another Annual Plan

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Glad I wasn’t the only person who noticed this. :wink:

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The initial introduction of $46,000/month licenses killed one of my businesses.
The late arrival of a BASIC license (yes, really basic) did not allow me to get things back on track.
The removal of the streaming API in the BASIC license has already cost me a lot of energy (and money) to recode my solution.
I was on the verge of pulling the plug. But I held on to satisfy my (too few but nevertheless satisfied) customers

With the increase of the BASIC license to $200 per month without an increase in the rate, I believe this is the third and final blow (yes, there was COVID before the $46K license).

See you Twitter/X, I am a really sad developer

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I definitely don’t agree with the price increase. 100 was too much. The 100 tier should have been free if you have either premium or premium+. Now it’s 200. Glad I cancelled my subscription a long time ago.

I might be able to make use of the free tier now, but it only mentions posts and reads, does ‘posts’ include retweets or only brand new tweets? I’m kind of thinking it doesn’t include retweets based on my preliminary postman testing of api endpoints (the docs aren’t even updated as of this post (for what tiers get access to what).

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Unless something changes we will also be retiring our support of the X platform after seeing these price adjustments. It was already hard to justify but we were an original supporter of Twitter and believed in the vision so decided to keep it going. I suppose keeping around smaller developers might not matter to Musk, but it seems like bigger companies are leaving too. Good luck to all.

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We need pricing and limits that align with growth. The current jump from $100 to $200, with restricted top-ups, makes scaling prohibitive. A usage-based model or more flexible tiers would solve this. Right now, it’s too expensive and limiting for sustainable progress. Let’s find a middle ground.

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What’s sad is that no matter what we say, they aren’t going to listen. Not a single word from the team. It’s disappointing.

@XDevelopers @sadev23 @taycaldwell any thoughts on all this?

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Wrote it up as an article on X and posted. also sent as a DM to developers. Hopefully they hear us out. Ideally, they want us to build and scale to attract more to the platform. As we develop with the X API and Grok API, we as the developers are promoting the use cases through automation with X and the power of the everything app. We should find balance in supporting each other as we grow with X and X with its developers who are passionate.

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Has this already gone live for Top Ups Limit? I can’t surpass 110,000 for additional posts. I get a cap error and to reach out to… someone?

Is 110k the max cap? This did not happen in previous months.

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I’ve also recommended usage-based billing. I am also struggling with the $100 monthly subscription rate.

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Hey, not sure if this thread is still active, but I have the new Basic plan, and I don’t see the button for top-ups. I need 20k tweets minimum for a research project, so I really want to be able to top-up my tweet limit. Is there a problem with the implementation of the top-up button or is this problem unique to my account?

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Oops, never mind. Ignore the previous post. The button only becomes available after you access 1000 tweets.

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Changes went live, seems like in the past 24hrs. They also have more restrictions than previously disclosed. Huge limitations in how often you can hit certain API endpoints.

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