So Twitter dropped a tweet on Thursday (from the @TwitterDev account, of all places, which honestly I forget still exists half the time) saying free access to the API is going away on February 9th. That's two days from when I'm typing this. No pricing announced yet, no tiers explained, nothing, just "a paid basic tier will be available" and a date. Cool, cool, very helpful, thanks.
I've got a dumb little bot running on a Raspberry Pi in my closet that checks the water level of the reservoir near my parents' house every morning and tweets it if it drops below a threshold. It has maybe eleven followers, one of whom is my dad. I built it in like an evening back in 2019 using the free tier of the API because that's just what you did: you signed up, you got a key, you wrote forty lines of Python, and you had a thing that worked. I haven't touched the code in years. And as of Thursday I have no idea if it's going to survive the week, because nobody's said what "paid" actually means for something this small. Is it five bucks a month? Is it a sales call? Is it gone entirely because I'm not worth their time at eleven followers?
This is the part that actually bugs me, more than the money would. It's the not knowing. Companies do this a lot now (announce the ending of something before they've figured out what replaces it), and it puts everyone building on top of them in this weird limbo where you can't even plan. You just wait and see if your stuff breaks.
I keep thinking about Google Reader shutting down in 2013, which I wrote about at the time (dug up the old post, I was way angrier than I remembered being). That felt like a bigger deal because so much of my daily reading ran through it, but at least Google gave you months of notice and a data export tool. This is a week. And this is a company that, since the ownership change last fall, has already broken or changed enough things that I've genuinely lost count: the verification system, the API rate limits that got quietly slashed back in December, the whole blue check mess. I don't think this is some grand strategic pricing decision so much as it is "we need revenue and the API costs us money to run for free." Which, fine, I get it, servers aren't free. But you can be honest about that reason without also being cagey about the actual numbers a week before the cutoff.
There's a whole tier of the internet that exists because of the free Twitter API and most people never think about it. Bots that tweet earthquake alerts. Accounts that post every time a Wikipedia edit happens from inside the US Congress. Weather bots, plane-spotting bots, a guy I follow who has a bot that tweets a haiku out of the first three tweets in his timeline every hour, which is somehow the funniest thing on my feed most days. None of these things make money. None of them were ever going to. They exist because the barrier to making one was basically zero, and a huge chunk of what made Twitter feel alive and weird instead of just another feed came from that.
I don't actually think my reservoir bot dying would be some tragedy. It won't be. But I do think there's something a little sad about a platform quietly closing the door on the exact kind of small, pointless, delightful project that used to be its whole personality, and doing it with two days notice and zero clarity on cost. I'll find out Thursday if my Pi in the closet still has a job. If it doesn't, I guess I'll dust it off for something else — I've got a Home Assistant setup that's been begging for more sensors anyway.
Anyway. If your side project runs on the Twitter API, this is your heads up in case you hadn't seen it. Back it up, export whatever you need, and maybe don't hold your breath waiting for a price sheet.