I am tracking 1-3 profiles with new tweets and retweets, i ping every 5-10 minutes i am not running api every minute, and even with that i would blow free tier in like 10 days
As far as I can tell, that’s not accurate. You wouldn’t blow through the free tier simply because you wouldn’t be able to use the free tier; the only free tier talked about from TwitterDev / their email (which I’ll quote as it’s a bit more clear than the tweet) is:
Limited Free Access
As this is extremely important to the developer ecosystem, we will also introduce a new form of free write access to the Twitter API limited to Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month for a single authenticated user token, as well as including free access to Login with Twitter.
Your discord bot that gets tweets for given account(s) doesn’t use ‘write access’ (for ‘Tweet creation’), instead it uses read access.
The situation for read access (e.g. using the search API endpoints) has not been specifically clarified, and for lack of such information one might presume that instead this is included with the Basic Access package (the $100/month one).
Either way it essentially ends the feasibility of your personal discord bot, along with many others, leaving a twitter-to-discord bridge only for the larger bots that already have premium options and can fund it out of those, or see enough use that they can start charging users (more) for keeping that twitter-to-discord bridge.
From a business point of view, this might make sense. ‘Good bots’ (their words, not mine) that post tweets to twitter might drive more traffic to the site; whether that’s emergency alerts or daily cat pictures - it’s something that they can easily get metrics for and monetize, especially on mobile.
You taking tweets and dropping them off-platform is not something they can easily monetize. Yes, people seeing them might be exposed to someone they would want to follow and actually go to twitter and (sign up and) follow them, would have to use twitter just to interact with the post, and so on. But that’s a far more nebulous concept to put into numbers.
I’m sure that if the above is the case, they’ll figure out real fast from traffic and bandwidth numbers that developers have plenty of alternate means of getting tweet content and fighting it incurs a lot of development time and cost (just ask instagram) only to still see that content posted off-platform, but (just like instagram) might still dig in.
It’s a shame, and my real fear is that more platforms are going down this road. We’re already far from an internet with rss feeds that could freely be followed and re-used on most platforms, but we’re rapidly heading to one where APIs are monetized and on-platform only, or non-existent altogether.
Ultimately though we just don’t have enough information as communication has been terrible (I’m looking at the Announcements section of these official Forums, and there’s no post about this. I’m looking at the blog, and there’s no post about this. I’m looking at TwitterDev, and there’s nothing that communicates clearly what the limits actually are, and we’re once again 1 day away from this change supposedly going through); which is ironic for a platform that is all about communication.
