Twitter isn't that friendly to developers, and it's tackling that issue with an update.
Previously, the best way for third-party developers to use Twitter's data is by using Twitter's APIs. They had two choices:
First, is to use the standard free API, and the second is to use the enterprise-oriented Gnip service. The two products differed significantly not just in cost, but also in the type of queries that could be performed.
There was nothing in between. And Twitter is changing that by rolling out 'Premium API'.
What it does, is bridging the gap between the standard free API and the enterprise-oriented Gnip service
The first of these is the Search Tweets API, which offers an easy access to the past 30 days of Twitter data.
Overall, the Premium APIs are more powerful that the free API.
Today we’re launching Twitter premium APIs to kick off the next era of innovation for Twitter developers.
These APIs provide a new transparent, predictable way to scale solutions on Twitter. https://t.co/4qtkeiUpDY pic.twitter.com/3FhH759Ik5— Twitter API (@TwitterAPI) November 14, 2017
Queries for example, will return more tweets per request, and developers will be able to make more requests, as overall limits are raised.
The Premium API also supports more complex queries, enhanced metadata results, and a counts endpoint that returns time-series counts of Tweets.
The price for the Premium API depends on how many requests the developers need to make. Initially available in a public beta, it costs from $149/month to $2,499/month, based on the level of access needed.
The company is also offering a free, limited sandbox, where developers can try the API before giving their credit card details to Twitter.
Alongside the update, Twitter is also launching a dashboard to allow developers to keep track of their usage. The "self-serve" portal that gives developers a better sense of their data use, has information updated within an interval of one minute (not in real-time).
But this should be sufficient in giving developers a good overview of how many API requests they have.
Twitter isn't introducing the Premium API to make it a source of revenue only, but also to lure more companies to sign up. The mid-tier option is aimed to be better than the free API, but without having too much capabilities like the expensive enterprise option, because indeed, the expensive option may be overkill to many small businesses.