Twitter introduces premium APIs for developer community

Twitter has introduced premium APIs to bridge the gap between the free service and the enterprise-level tools it provides through Gnip. The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of Twitter’s enterprise APIs to its broader developer ecosystem for the first time. 

Prior to this, the developer platform provided two types of access to Twitter data:

• Standard (free and public) APIs that provide basic query functionality and foundational access to Twitter data, and
• Enterprise APIs (Gnip), which deliver real-time and historical data to power businesses at scale

However, this left a gap that made it painful for growing businesses to deliver scalable solutions to customers. With the introduction of Twitter premium APIs, this gap has been bridged. The new premium APIs include a clear upgrade path that scales access and price to fit customers’ needs. 

Historical search 

Launched in public beta, the first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data. Soon, additional endpoint will be added, which will enable access to the full history of Twitter data, going all the way back to @jack’s first Tweet in 2006. 

These premium Search endpoints provide functionality beyond what’s available in standard search/ Tweets endpoint, including:

• More Tweets per request
• Higher rate limits
• A counts endpoint that returns time-series counts of Tweets
• More complex queries
• Meta data enrichments, such as expanded URLs and improved profile geo information

Premium APIs include flexible month-to-month contracts and scaled tiers of access based on the number of requests. Pricing for these elevated tiers of the Search Tweets API starts at $149 per month. Premium APIs also include limited access within a free sandbox. 

Meanwhile, Twitter is also introducing a new self-serve developer portal that gives users more transparent access to their data usage. The portal allows them to easily upgrade to increased levels of access and premium functionality as their needs change and to manage their subscriptions and payments. Over time, Twitter will migrate more functionality out of apps.twitter.com to its improved experience in the new portal. 

What’s next? 

In the coming weeks and months, Twitter will be rolling out new premium endpoints. It will be replacing legacy endpoints like search/tweets with a more powerful and streamlined API that provides increased access when rate limits are reached.