- Twitter plans to charge developers to access the API used to make third-party services and bots.
- Elon Musk has tweeted it would offer a free, write-only API for bots "providing good content."
Elon Musk has said "bots providing good content" for free will be exempt from Twitter's $4 to charge for access to the API developers use to make them, after the proposal sparked a backlash.
Saying he was "responding to feedback," Musk $4 late Saturday: "Twitter will enable a light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free."
Twitter $4 on Thursday that it would block free access to its API from February 9. $4 then that the free access had previously been "abused badly" by "bot scammers & opinion manipulators."
"Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly," he tweeted.
Musk's proposed change might offer a lifeline to popular, free-to-use bots on Twitter — some of which have already announced impending moves to Mastodon in light of the announcement free API access would be blocked.
The developer behind popular bot-creation service $4, which currently supports around 54,000 Twitter accounts, previously $4 after February 9.
Responding to Musk's latest comment, they wrote: "or maybe not??? god, who knows any more."
—v buckenham (@v21) $4
Neither Twitter nor Musk immediately responded to requests for comment from Insider.
Twitter currently offers $4 for its API, according to its $4. The Premium package costs between $149 and $2,499 per month, depending on how many tweets a developer requests.
Some popular third-party services, such as Tweetbot and Twitterific, had already been forced to $4 after $4 its API in mid-January.
The proposed API charges follow Musk's attempts to monetize the blue-check verification process by introducing Twitter Blue, which allowed users to buy blue checkmarks for $8 per month.