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. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.
I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability.
$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
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.
There's more to posting/saving a tweet than just the data sent over the wire. There's many indexes, notifications and other analysis that happens. The free tiers of the API usage are what was bringing Twitter to it's knees in terms of overhead, not the actual users.
And bots using a browser with actual interaction patterns that at least resemble a person (not pulling through hundreds of messages in under a half a second or posting in 10ms after the form loads) is much more of a throttle, especially with per-ip rate limiting in place than the raw API access.
> Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.
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.
From a systems engineering point of view you want people hitting an API for programmatic requests. The alternative isn’t “The bots magically go away”, they just get more sophisticated, mix in with and impersonate user traffic, and become impossible to properly rate limit without collateral damage. APIs are for the benefit of the service provider as much as they are for developers.
This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it.
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.
I honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.
I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.
Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually.
These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want.
Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.
And my point is that they don't care about the $5/month devs. And the scrapers or intermediaries will just expend their own resources. With less overhead on Twitter's backend.
It's pretty easy to throttle browser requests without anyone noticing and blocking excess requests from a single IP block.
That you think they should care, doesn't mean they actually do.
