As you may have already heard, Twitter has announced that they will cease support for free access to the Twitter API (Application Programming Interface). The sole information published about this to this point is a short Twitter thread; if you’ve read that, you know about as much as I do about what’s going to happen. Anything else is probably rumors.

There are existing published costs for access to the Twitter Search API, but those are very separate from the rest of the API and may not be directly relevant.

Will changes be required to WP to Twitter or WP Tweets Pro?

I don’t know at this point whether I’ll need to make any changes to how WP to Twitter works to support this. If I do, it’s almost a guarantee that this work will not be done when the switchover happens. Based on their announcement, I only have six days until the change right now – and no information.

How will these costs impact you, as a user?

Since all API access is controlled by you through your own developer account with Twitter, you will bear the brunt of these costs. You will have to establish an account with Twitter and pay for your access.

How might this impact my willingness to support and maintain WP to Twitter?

WP to Twitter makes very little revenue as it is. If I end up doing a lot of support because of this, or need to make significant changes to the plug-in, I will most likely just shut everything down and close the plug-in. That’s a purely practical decision.

If the API costs are very affordable for the average small user, then I’ll probably keep things as they are.

If the API costs are very expensive for the average small user, I suspect that will completely destroy the WP to Twitter user base, and there will be little to no justification to my continuing to maintain it.

If the API costs are so high that I need to spend a significant percentage of my revenue to develop the plug-in, that is also likely to result in shutting it down.

I’ll update this post as I learn anything.