[biznickman]

Years ago they raised the minimum API entry pricing. I used to pay for Topsy and they gave aggregate data that was quite insightful and reasonably priced.

Soon after Apple's acquisition they (1) jacked up the price, and then (2) shut it down soon after.

The reality is that Twitter doesn't have the resources allocated to manage tiny customers and doesn't desire to. That decision was made years ago. They can give an employee 10 customers to manage each of whom spend $36,000 a year and likely will increase and the math adds up.

Is anybody really shocked by this pricing?

[manigandham]

Yes, because the platform is a worldwide social network, not a B2B app. Also what is there to manage? There's no need for the vast majority of app developers to talk to anyone to use an API.

[StudentStuff]

OP has a legacy mindset, essentially the only time I talk to a company about their API is when it returns bad data, or is non-functional. Outside of that, I might interact with an account manager at onboarding (due to some companies forcing you to deal with one), and if the API is heavily used, I may reach out and ask 'em if they can go cheaper, while shopping around with other companies offering APIs for said purpose.