Elon Musk broke my SaaS business
Twitter recently increased the price for accessing their API.
In order for us to keep supporting Twitter, we would have to pay $42,000/month!
Here's what happened...
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Twitter recently increased the price for accessing their API.
In order for us to keep supporting Twitter, we would have to pay $42,000/month!
Here's what happened...
Twitter is getting worse with Elon Musk tbh
Moral of the story: Don't put your eggs in Musk's basket.
Your right! else he will throw them away at any time!
Actually, don't put your eggs in nobody else's basket.
Sometimes, it becomes necessary!
I agree. He improved absolutely nothing so far.
Last month, me and a friend were planning to launch a product to help twitter users to autoDM digital products to their audience but we completly dump the idea after finding that the api will cost us $42k per month 🤣
Since then I was wondering how many companies had to close their twitter integrations cause of that.
Nice to find your video addressing the situation and how you came up with a solution. Now I am wondering if the api key solution that you applied could work for us 🤔
We used this solution to "soften the hit" and to give our current users a decent alternative. But I wouldn't recommend starting a new product from scratch relying on this API Key solution.
After all, Twitter can close down the free developer accounts at any moment as well, effectively rendering this solution useless. It's still super risky.
Musk said Twitter currently earns 5 to 6 cents per hour with users spending a combined "130 million hours of their time per day" on the platform. He said the company could increase it to 15 to 20 cents. Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters.
I had a similar thing happen building on Twitter years ago. They essentially rate limited the endpoints I was using to the point where the product became worthless.
As far as I'm concerned, no one should be building on Twitter until its iteration cycles slow way down and they become "stable" again.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with that!
Fascinating move considering their position. We used to maintain a Twitter Marketing API integration (at my full-time work) and sunsetted it last year because it got so little use. I'm flabbergasted that they are trying to charge for something that is not critical to most businesses.
I think it's more "Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" kind of situation, Musk is trying to monetize Twitter in every way possible. I mean I can't blame him, Twitter is famously hemorrhaging money like crazy and it has never been profitable, and Musk must be having some epic buyers remorse.
Yeah totally agree on your points on why this is happening, but clearly there are more thoughtful ways to go about monetizing. in the end even Twitter has a limited amount of things it can do and doing things that are obviously flawed is a waste of time (or even worse setting you back in the long term like this example).
Like use damn usage limits. Fuck elon for shutting down biz
$42k/month is crazy! But for TW to start charging you that amount for using the api you should have a very high volume. With that much volume, in most cases, you should be able to monetize your SaaS more than 42k/month.
Here's my story
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-i-m-building-in-twitter-space-even-though-others-are-leaving-8260cafd6e
IMHO Musk obviously chose this price, $42k, to push those businesses off Twitter. He is doing that to build those features into the platform itself.
It's understandable when considering other platforms do this sort of thing, but they remain viable options to devs for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, they have breadth, like the Apple app store. While they've undoubtedly borrowed app ideas to build into the iPhone or iOS, they need other devs to complement their offerings.
Secondly, they have ecosystems that need content, so they need to nurture devs and do a great job. Twitter has neither.
What's left is that Twitter is turning into a media company, with user-generated content, not a platform that can thrive with external help.
Giving the ownership to Elon was never a good idea. He’s now just charging for everything massively.
"Giving" is not the word. Dunno if you're aware but the legal duty of the office holders of a company is to the shareholders, not the users or staff's continued employment.
If someone comes along and says "I want to pay you a stupid amount of money (but may destroy what's been built)" they are legally obliged to sell. They are not obliged to keep the company operating once it's sold.
Blame corporation law.
I understand, but it was up to them if they want to sell the company or not. Not selling would have been a much better decision I think.
I fucking hate new changes. It's a nightmare for any goddamn api user. I'm fucking sick of elon.
Maybe it's a good time to look at some alternative solutions
Or just shit on elon. Not literally
I kinda think tqitter is getting better tbh
This is wild!
I was prepared to remove Twitter integration from our product as well and even send out the newsletter to all the users.
But it never did stop working. This was quite surprising.
Unfortunately, this only works with the v1 endpoints (and limited v2 endpoints).
We were using the v2 endpoints quite heavily, which required us to update immediately 😥
And the v1 endpoints will be wrapped up soon, that's for sure.
Yeah, I understand. That really sucks what they did.
Still weird that v1 endpoints still works, although they shouldn't
PS As a little replacement for customers, I offered using their own API keys. They can have it for $100 and the limits should be enough for just one person. But that's for my product. I can understand it may not work for all.
I think Elon has pulled out from this. Our Twitter App has started to work again. This is on https://deallite.uk
He didn't. They're just having a bit of delay pulling all the v1 endpoints since some of them doesn't have v2 replacements yet.
You'll lose access soon enough, I'm afraid.
OK. So far it's working and our customers and I will enjoy it whilst it lasts.
How much are you paying Twitter now and what is your MRR?
We're not reporting MRR publicly anymore, but as I said in the video, if we badly needed to pay Twitter the $42,000/month, we could.
We went another route, so now we're paying Twitter $0 😁
If you don't mind me asking, which "other route" did you go to?
That's the part where you should watch the video I linked to above 😊
He wants twitter to be a SaaS startup
Agree 100% SaaS is wrong for Twitter. However, some mix of ads plus subscriptions is likely the future of these platforms. The new CEO (Linda Yaccarino) is an ads person — so I'm guessing ads aren't going away in meaningful way.