Introducing Twitter premium APIs

In the spring, we laid out a vision for our API platform and published a public roadmap. We made a commitment to give you, our developer community, a unified platform with scalable access to Twitter data. We also promised more predictability so that you can confidently build businesses with Twitter. Today we’re excited to deliver the next big piece of these commitments with Twitter premium APIs.

Before today, our developer platform provided two types of access to Twitter data:

• our standard (free and public) APIs that provide basic query functionality and foundational access to Twitter data, and
• our enterprise APIs (Gnip), which deliver real-time and historical data to power businesses at scale.

However, this left a gap that made it painful for growing businesses to deliver scalable solutions to customers — a concern that we’ve heard at developer events, in our forums, and in conversations. You’ve also asked us to make it easier to innovate and test new ideas.

Today, with the introduction of Twitter premium APIs, we are bridging this gap to help you tap into what’s happening, as you grow.

The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of our enterprise APIs to our broader developer ecosystem for the first time. They include a clear upgrade path that scales access and price to fit your needs. We’ve built these new products to enable innovation — whether you’re just getting started and building a proof of concept, or are an established company experimenting with new products and ideas.  

Historical search
Launching today in public beta, our first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data. Soon, we’ll add an additional endpoint that will enable access to the full history of Twitter data, going all the way back to @jack’s first Tweet in 2006.

These premium Search endpoints provide functionality beyond what’s available in our standard search/Tweets endpoint, including:

• more Tweets per request
• higher rate limits
• a counts endpoint that returns time-series counts of Tweets
• more complex queries
• metadata enrichments, such as expanded URLs and improved profile geo information

For years, our enterprise customers have been using historic access to discover trends, analyze events, enable customer exploration, and more. We’re excited to extend this functionality to our broader developer community.

To make it easy for you to adjust your use as your needs evolve, our premium APIs include flexible month-to-month contracts and scaled tiers of access based on the number of requests. Pricing for these elevated tiers of the Search Tweets API starts at $149/month. To ensure it’s easy to get started, our premium APIs also include limited access within a free sandbox.  

We’re also introducing a new self-serve developer portal that gives you more transparent access to your data usage. The portal allows you to easily upgrade to increased levels of access and premium functionality as your needs change — and to manage your subscriptions and payments. With self-serve access you have a new way to harness the live, conversational, and public nature of Twitter—on your own terms. Over time, we’ll migrate more functionality out of apps.twitter.com to our improved experience in the new portal.

Getting started with premium APIs
Starting today, our premium Search Tweets API and new dashboard are available in public beta. As with any new platform, we need to be able to test and refine as we scale in order to ensure a quality experience. To get started, complete the new application and we’ll grant access as the platform scales.

What’s next?
This is just the beginning. We’ll be rolling out new premium endpoints in the coming weeks and months. Also, as we laid out in April, we'll be replacing legacy endpoints like search/tweets with a more powerful and streamlined API that provides increased access when rate limits are reached. As always, you can follow our public roadmap to see what’s coming, visit our forum to tell us what you’d like to see, or visit our new developer resource center for documentation and guidance.  

We’re excited about what this new chapter means for our Twitter developer community, and we can’t wait to see what you build with this new set of capabilities.