#1

Hello,
I’ve just registered to the Developer center and I’m confused to the limits I have.
As explained in my registration form, I need to use the APIs for a university project (I’m a computer engineering student) and I don’t need them for a commercial application.
I’ve already seen this other question but I’m honestly confused about the actual limits.
From this page I can see the monthly cap of 1M tweets, with a rate limit of 30 requests per minute, and both are perfectly fine.
Once logged in though, I can see a limit of just 50 requests per month with the sandbox environment.

So my questions are:

  1. Why isn’t the 50 requests a month limit not listed in the pricing page for the Premium Sandbox tier? What’s even the point of saying the sandbox environment has a 1M tweets limit and 30 requests per minute limit, if actually the limit is really 50 requests per month? Am I missing something?
  2. Regarding my use case: I need to download a number of tweets from, say, the last 6 months here in Italy, to use them to do some NLP processing and extract information to only use in this university project. I’ve described everything in detail during my registration on the developer portal. Is there any way for a student to be able to do this without having to pay for a license? If necessary, I have no problem getting in touch with someone from the staff and sharing documents or whatnot to prove that I’m really a university student. Or, are there free tiers for students that I haven’t seen yet?

Thank you for your help!
Sergio

#2

Yeah, the 1M tweets limit only comes in for the highest “tiers” of paid premium where you get 2,500 requests each potentially retrieving 500 tweets, which would put you over the 1M tweets limit.

Unfortunately there’s nothing that i know of for students / academic use - but depending on what exactly your project is you might be better off using the Standard Search API / Streaming API for more recent tweets? Or have a search around to see if you can use an existing dataset like Documenting the Now Catalog that you can hydrate and use that instead

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#3

I have to say though that the limits listed for the sandbox environment in that pricing page are super confusing though, and I can see I’m not the first one saying this.
As for those archives, unfortunately those won’t work for me, as the project was supposed to be for Italian websites (as similar projects have already been done with Tweets in English).

It’s a shame that there aren’t free subscriptions for university students though, I thought Twitter would offer something like that too, like lots of other companies.
Oh well, I guess we’ll have to look into something else than.
Thank you for your reply and for your help!

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#4

Hey @SergioPedri, thanks for the feedback.

You’re not the first person to express the need/desire for a subscription tier for researchers and academics. As you can see from this post on our feedback platform, this is something that we are interested in giving further consideration: Updates on our feedback channels - Announcements - Twitter Developers Feel free to vote for this idea (or add a comment) if you agree with it.

As for the confusion around rate limits, I will raise this with the team to see if we can make things a little more clear.

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#5

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