Twitter expands API program

Twitter has unveiled a new option for developers that want to interact with the social media platform.

Until now the company has provided two forms of access to its platform: Basic access via free APIs and enterprise APIs.

This “this left a gap that made it painful for growing businesses to deliver scalable solutions to customers,” Twitter senior product manager Adam Tornes wrote in a blog entry.

The company is launching “Twitter premium APIs” to bridge that gap.

“The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of our enterprise APIs to our broader developer ecosystem for the first time,” Tornes wrote.

“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.”

The first premium offering is Search Tweets API. The API offers access to the past 30 days of Twitter data, with Tornes revealing Twitter’s plan to “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.”

The new API will have a range advantages over the company’s current free offerings including more Tweets per request and support for more complex queries.

The company will offer month-to-month contracts and pricing tiers for its premium APIs. Pricing for Search Tweets API starts at US$149/month.

The company said it will provide limited access to the APIs in a free sandbox as well as introducing a new self-serve portal to help developers track data usage.