$100/mo gets a hobbyist:

- Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints

- 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level

- 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level

- 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap

Elon talks about the average size of a tweet as 100 bytes (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065?lang...) so we're talking about writing 5.3MB of data and reading 1MB of data per month.

There's no world where that costs $100, $10, or even $1. My GoogleFi plan costs me $10/1GB.

It's wildly apparent that Twitter is overstating the value of the service they provide to the detriment to their users. They aren't trying to offer break-even prices for hobbyists.

You seem to have a really skewed sense of how Twitter's API actually works, and you also seem to be under the incredibly incorrect impression that the API has no rate limiting.

Like most services, Twitter actually saved money by offering a free API with OAuth, because the alternative is for people to use web scrapers and direct access by password, which is orders of magnitude more expensive both due to direct network traffic costs and due to the security costs of people/apps doing insecure things to get around the lack of an API.

> Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore.

This is literally an argument for requiring all Twitter users to pay to use the service, since the official apps all use the same API.

You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.

Bro... Twitter can definitely handle the traffic generated by developers using their APIs. I doubt it even registers on their dashboards.

Twitter goes from 0 to 100 to…5000

That’s not reasonable. That’s just plain hostile.