Twitter delays new paid API launch by 'a few more days'

Twitter continues confusing shift away from free API

Since mid January, developers and Twitter users alike have been awaiting the social media platform's plans for API use. It started with an unceremonious end of the third-party API for clients, then a threat to the end of the free API used by professionals and bot accounts alike.

The latest delay doesn't have a date attached, unlike the previous two announcements. First, Twitter announced that the free API would be cut off on February 9 and replaced with an unknown paid plan, then that cut-off was pushed back to February 13 without warning.

The latest delay simply states that the company will be taking "a few more days" to ensure the developer community will have an optimal experience with the new API. It isn't yet clear what the paid and limited free tiers will look like when they launch, but the current announced rate is a $100 per month API fee.

A limited free access tier to the API is also being introduced, but all that is known is that it enables 1,500 tweets per month from a single authenticated user token. This is a write-only API, so third-party clients will not be coming back, nor will this enable RSS feeds to read Twitter timelines.

Twitter claims the changes will increase quality, reduce spam, and enable a thriving ecosystem. It's not quite clear how that will be accomplished.

Each decision has left the Twitter tech community in a state of confusion. Users have begun migrating to Mastodon as an alternative, with popular developers like Tapbots building clients like Ivory.