For yet another time, X will hike the price of accessing its API, making the job of third-party apps much tougher to justify any data access on X.

Third-party apps can allow API access to let customers share posts to X, schedule posts, and other advanced products like profile and post analytics.

Those can be fantastic ways to increase the usage of apps, but not even a year ago, after purchasing the social network once known as Twitter, Elon Musk revamped the application programming interface's pricing - with the bottom line of that effort being the removal of generative AI projects' ability to siphon X data by scraping. And, that move was at least partially done to settle some personal scores from Musk who had had some spats with OpenAI that had obtained access to Twitter data as it had built its very first language models for that social networking service.

However, newer, much more vast API price tiers meant most third-party Twitter apps disappeared since they could no longer afford the cost of extracting the information they needed to serve. Other tools merged so they could water down some of the effects as well as possible, but what it's really done overall is make many former third-party Twitter apps, which includes a wide variety of analytics tools, disappear forever.

And now X is increasing its prices once again, now that what was free under the "Basic" tier has now doubled to cost $200 a month where previously it was $100 a month. X also adjusted the price of its "Premium" access option for the user, which pegged it at $42k a month. A charge will also be placed at $1 per month extra on each account, as connected to X's API, through the users' apps.

Which, when multiplied by the individual users of each app, may come out to some pricey price increase for many third-party platforms.

That might mean more third-party X apps are pushed out of business-for those might impact your workflow for the app.

It's, in some ways, a step backwards for the platform, which has had a pretty checkered relationship with third-party developers. Initial Twitter management played the courtship game, trying to woo third party developers in order to provide greater access to the services offered by the platform until it decided to cut it off in its pursuit to develop its own business models. It then attempted to turn back to the developers for reconciliation in 2015, but now, I think that the former app for birds is looking every which way to make money that it can to offset loses from ad revenue.

Meaning, API access is going to cost you. And those costs are going to make fewer apps incorporate X. Is that a good move overall? Time will tell, but again, previous Twitter management realized the error of its ways on this front, and did seek to re-establish connection on order to regain those exposure benefits.

X has also introduced a little more polish to its API access tiers over time, including one-off expanded access for a flat fee.
It has thus responded to some of the developer's grievances too, but generally this has meant that accessing X now costs developers more than it used to, and that will only limit its ecosystem further.

Will that then mean that it brings in more revenue for X as a consequence? History suggests it won't, but the age of gen AI and the need for human input has changed the game in many ways.

And in this sense maybe X is just ahead of the curve. Or perhaps it believes that the value of its own AI projects will be considerably boosted as a result.