Rumored Twitter API changes might kill my product. Should I still release?
Hey everyone, I have a free side project that I monetize with ads which has slowly grown to about 700 unique visitors a day which is built on the Twitter API. It's called www.tweetsort.io, and currently it makes about $20 per month! 🤑
When I heard about the possibility of a $10/m Twitter API charge, I decided that I should try to monetize this further just in case. I put some work in to add subscriptions (my first time using Stripe) and added some premium features. I had a lot of people in my DMs excited about this, and I think out of the gate I would've had 10 to 20 users who were interested in subscribing. My main hope was to prevent any API price increases from killing my project, which has been around for a few years.
Since then, there are even more rumors about some crazy Twitter API prices. I've heard that the endpoints my site is built on will only be included in the enterprise API plans, and the starting price for those is usually in the thousands of dollars per month. This particular rumor indicated that meaningful read access could cost at least $40k/m LOL
My question is: should I still release my Pro offering, and start taking subscriptions with the future of the API plans at Twitter still up in the air? I don't want to get going on this then have to backtrack a month later. I would feel like I disappointed people, and made a promise I couldn't keep. Of course I would refund, but I'm leaning towards not releasing at all.
Please let me know your thoughts.
If you've done the work, you might as well release, charge per month and refund the current month in case your access gets blocked. It may not get blocked!
I'm somewhat in the same boat; built a project around an XML export of a 3rd party site, launched and a month later that 3rd party site announced they would stop offering the XML export.
Lesson learned; do not depend on a 3rd party that you're not paying..
Hey, I appreciate your response. It's a good point, maybe they will change their minds or push it further out!
Building on a platform is always a gamble, I just didn't expect the pricing updates to be this expensive since this change would effectively kill most projects built on the API.
Use Puppeteer/Selenium instead of relying on their API. But of course that would cost you a lot more.