X Is Testing A Pay-per-use Pricing Model For Its Api

Two years aft revamping its developer programs and pricing, X is expanding nan closed beta of a pay-per-use scheme for its API to much developers.

The societal web is accepting applications from developers who want to beryllium a portion of nan program, nan company’s developer relationship wrote successful a station connected X.

“We are expanding a closed beta to some caller & powerfulness users who want to vessel astonishing apps connected X,” nan station read.

X’s caller API page shows nan costs of different kinds of requests, specified arsenic reading, creating posts, DMs, trends and pulling bookmarks. The page besides has a calculator that lets developers estimate really overmuch a bundle of API usage mightiness cost. This differs from X’s older system, wherever each requests costs nan same.

A conception connected nan caller API page compares nan caller pricing pinch nan aged tier-based system. It is not yet clear if X yet wants to get free of nan older plan-based system. We person asked X to explain and will update this communicative if we perceive back.

X’s caller pay-per-use exemplary won’t person monthly tier caps. Image Credits: X

The closed beta comes 2 years aft X overhauled its API pricing. In early 2023, nan institution started blocking third-party clients of nan app, and successful February 2023, nan institution said that it was ending free entree to its API, which resulted successful various apps shutting down.

Then successful March 2023, nan societal web introduced a $100-per-month basal tier (which now costs $200 per month) arsenic good arsenic a $42,000-per-month endeavor tier. A fewer months later, it launched a $5,000-per-month Pro plan that gave developers nan expertise to fetch 1 cardinal tweets per period and station 300,000 tweets per month, and gives them entree to nan afloat archive hunt endpoint.

However, nan plans proved insufficient aliases were simply unaffordable for a batch of developers. To mitigate this, nan institution past twelvemonth launched top-up packs for applications that deed their API tier limits.

With this caller usage-based plan, X could triumph backmost developers who wanted to merge their app pinch nan societal network, aliases intend to build applications that activity pinch it.