#1

Hey guys!

We have a SaaS platform (www.rocketbots.io) serves as a messaging aggregator for all social media platforms and messaging apps (a Hootsuite for messaging apps), so teams can answer all incoming messages in one place. Connecting some channels (like facebook) it’s a one-click integration; however, the Twitter integration is not quite as easy. As far as we understand we have 2 options:

  1. Prompt out users to create a Twitter developer account, wait for approval, and follow a couple of technical steps to connect their Twitter accounts to start receiving DMs into our platform.

  2. We need to pay a fee per Twitter API subscription, which will allow us to provide the one-click integration to Twitter accounts.

As you can imagine the first option is a way too complicated and very few of our 10k corporate users are willing to go through that process.

Option 2, is sadly too expensive for startups like us. The initial fee for each Twitter API subscription is USD13 (per account), most of our customers are paying us USD19, so that’s a problem. On the other side, we also have 8k companies on our free plan, and paying for them wouldn’t make sense at that rate either.

This is really a pity, we would love to invite more users to use Twitter DM as a primary communication channel, but currently, it’s either too expensive or too complicated. We understand the current model works for larger enterprises with millions of API calls, but it’s really stopping startups like us to grow with Twitter.

Is there anything we can do about this? Have you considered a startup program that gives startups access to the API at discounted rates or free for some time? Most companies like SendGrid, Segment & Twilio already have programs like this.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

#2

Option 1 is not compatible with the developer policy - you should never ask users to provide their own keys and tokens to your application. This is not an acceptable solution.

To integrate with Direct Messages, you have two options:

  • use the RESTful Direct Message endpoints to receive and send messages
  • use the webhooks-based Account Activity API to receive messages, and the RESTful API to send messages.

If you’re set on using the Account Activity API, then unfortunately the premium packaging is the only initial option, or you could contact our enterprise team to discuss larger scale deployment since you mention thousands of customers. The RESTful option is available as a fallback, with a higher latency on receiving inbound messages.

Finally, if you’d like to submit ideas for the future, please take a look at our Developer Feedback channel for Twitter Developer Labs.

#3

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