[SeanAnderson]

I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability.

$100/mo gets a hobbyist:

- Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints

- 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level

- 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level

- 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap

Elon talks about the average size of a tweet as 100 bytes (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065?lang...) so we're talking about writing 5.3MB of data and reading 1MB of data per month.

There's no world where that costs $100, $10, or even $1. My GoogleFi plan costs me $10/1GB.

It's wildly apparent that Twitter is overstating the value of the service they provide to the detriment to their users. They aren't trying to offer break-even prices for hobbyists.

[tracker1]

There's more to posting/saving a tweet than just the data sent over the wire. There's many indexes, notifications and other analysis that happens. The free tiers of the API usage are what was bringing Twitter to it's knees in terms of overhead, not the actual users.

And bots using a browser with actual interaction patterns that at least resemble a person (not pulling through hundreds of messages in under a half a second or posting in 10ms after the form loads) is much more of a throttle, especially with per-ip rate limiting in place than the raw API access.