In this pretty long post, we are going to explain:. What are those Twitter API keys we keep talking about. What changed.

05 Jun 2023, 12:43

In this pretty long post, we are going to explain: 1. What are those Twitter API keys we keep talking about 2. What changed 3. What is the issue with them 4. Why it is currently holding us back 5. What are we currently doing 🧠 Let’s dive in. 1. Twitter API Keys are keys that Twitter gives to developers and they are used to access Twitter’s data. Because BagBot needs to access Twitter to know when someone tweets about projects, we need Twitter to give us this API key. 2. For the past few years, the keys were given out for free, and they were pretty powerful. This was what we used up until a few months ago. However, everything changed when Elon took over twitter and was determined to make Twitter profitable (https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/twitter-to-cancel-free-access-to-api-from-feb-9-many-apps-to-get-affected-123020201209_1.html). Back in March 2023, he announced that the free API keys are cancelled, and two new PAID api keys are coming: basic key that costs 100$ a month and is laughably bad because it is extremely limited, and an enterprise API key that costs 42,000$ PER MONTH. This decision literally KILLED many apps that relied on Twitter, including extremely big ones like the New York Metro report, Microsoft and researches in big universities. Here are just a few articles about Elon Musk’s API scandal: Only two weeks ago, Twitter added a third api key option - a “Pro” plan that costs 5,000$ PER MONTH. Although it is extremely expensive, this is finally a somewhat sane solution we should be able to work with. 3. We started trying to get access to these new api keys back in around March, when we understood the free keys we used thus far are about to be cancelled. However, it is never easy with Twitter. We tried paying for the keys from multiple credit cards (including American and European, Visa and Mastercard, Bank issued and non-bank cards), but Twitter kept declining them. Even some of the mods and people like Fish tried to use their own cards and failed with the same error (https://t.me/teh_bag/403519). We tried contacting Twitter about it multiple times and from multiple accounts. Twitter’s support is notoriously bad and they are known to never respond to tickets. However after a few weeks they said they are aware of a billing issue they have with the API keys and they are working to fix It (https://t.me/teh_bag/402557). Here are some support tickets that people online sent to Twitter (some of it is also from a few years ago, to illustrate how bad it has been for years): It may be worth to mention that one of our previous mods claimed to have been able to pay for an API key, and he offered us his account so we can use this API key. We appreciated the offer, but we declined for a simple reason - launching a production product with hundreds of customers like BagBot means we must have full control over the API keys. What would happen if the mod decided to close his account? What would happen if the mod decided to stop supporting $BAG? What would happen if the mod suddenly went rogue for any reason? We obviously could not accept such an offer and have hundreds of our clients rely on someone we do not know.