Twitter delays launch of its new API platform again

Twitter ruffled a lot of feathers earlier this month when it announced its plans to cut the free access to its API. The company initially set a February 9 deadline to enforce the rule but later delayed it to February 13. Now, the social network has delayed the shutdown of free API again — and this time there is no date in the latest of the growing list of uncertainties at the Elon Musk-owned firm.

The Twitter Developer account said late Monday that the company will be delaying the launch of the new API platform “by a few more days.” There has been an “immense amount of enthusiasm” for the upcoming platform change, the company insisted.

Over the last few weeks, the developer community has expressed concerns over the lack of transparency and information from the social media company. The company partly responded to that by briefly putting the developer forum website behind a login last week without any explanation. The site, open again, is flooded with questions from the developers seeking clarification on how the new API will be priced.  

The delay also jeopardizes the plans of developers and startups building tools around Twitter API as they wouldn’t have any clarity on future spending and budget allocation on the platform.

Twitter said last week that the base tier of the API with “low-level usage” will be priced at $100, but did not share how much usage falls under the “low-level” bracket. The company also said that it will provide a free write-only API that is good for posting 1,500 tweets a month. This was following Elon Musk’s promise to provide a light API to “good” content-providing bots.

Tons of academics and researchers are also worried that they have to spend money to access Twitter data, which was earlier available for free under the Academic Research tier of the Twitter v2 API.