X is testing a pay-per-use pricing mannequin for its API | TechCrunch

Two years after revamping its developer packages and pricing, X is increasing the closed beta of a pay-per-use plan for its API to extra builders.

The social community is accepting functions from builders who need to be part of this system, the corporate’s developer account wrote in a submit on X.

“We are expanding a closed beta to both new & power users who want to ship amazing apps on X,” the submit learn.

X’s new API web page reveals the prices of various sorts of requests, similar to studying, creating posts, DMs, traits and pulling bookmarks. The web page additionally has a calculator that lets builders estimate how a lot a bundle of API utilization may cost. This differs from X’s older system, the place all requests value the identical.

A piece on the brand new API web page compares the brand new pricing with the outdated tier-based system. It’s not but clear if X finally desires to do away with the older plan-based system. We’ve got requested X to make clear and can replace this story if we hear again.

The closed beta comes two years after X overhauled its API pricing. In early 2023, the corporate began blocking third-party purchasers of the app, and in February 2023, the corporate stated that it was ending free entry to its API, which resulted in numerous apps shutting down.

Then in March 2023, the social community launched a $100-per-month fundamental tier (which now prices $200 monthly) in addition to a $42,000-per-month enterprise tier. A couple of months later, it launched a $5,000-per-month Professional plan that gave builders the power to fetch 1 million tweets monthly and submit 300,000 tweets monthly, and offers them entry to the total archive search endpoint.

Nonetheless, the plans proved inadequate or have been merely unaffordable for lots of builders. To mitigate this, the corporate final 12 months launched top-up packs for functions that hit their API tier limits.

With this new usage-based plan, X may win again builders who wished to combine their app with the social community, or intend to construct functions that work with it.