In March of this year, X (formerly known as Twitter) announced that they would be monetising their API.
Although this included a free and Basic package at $100 per month, the associated limitations made it challenging for third-party platforms like Sendible managing a significant amount of Twitter accounts (we currently manage over 20,000) to maintain basic functionality.
Navigating X’s challenges
Our focus during this time has been to minimise disruption to our customers. Initially, we entered an Enterprise agreement with X at a cost of $40,000 per month to ensure a seamless transition.
Since then, we have been looking at how we can still provide a reliable and valuable service to those of our customers who rely on X to engage with their audience, without needing to increase our pricing.
As X looks to further monetise and fully roll out v2 of their API, which comes with its own set of limits, we’ve encountered complexities that haven’t been a factor up until this point.
Despite our intentions to roll out a comprehensive plan, uncertainties from X prompted us to make some changes ahead of schedule.
What’s our plan?
Our plan has always been focused on protecting the ability to publish to X without increasing the price of our subscriptions. As we can no longer sustain an Enterprise agreement cost without passing it on to our customers, we have transitioned to the Pro plan on November 14th. This allows us to continue providing publishing to X at no additional cost for the time being.
What does this mean for you?
Publishing
You can continue to publish to X at no additional cost.
Other X related functionality
We have removed all other functionality heavily reliant on X on November 14th. This includes:
- Reporting: All reporting options related to X will be removed.
- Engagement: All social feed options and the ability to receive alerts for activity on X, either via email or the Priority Inbox will be removed.
- Monitoring: Options specifically related to searches based on Keywords will be removed including related reporting. If monitoring of keywords is crucial for your business, we’d recommend Awario or Brand24 as low-cost alternatives.
While we may be able to reintroduce some of this functionality in a limited capacity in the future, we currently have been unable to find a way to do this which will ensure the reliability necessary to ultimately deliver value.
Renaming 'Twitter' to ‘X’ in-app
We initially planned to update mentions of Twitter in-app to 'X' in these updates. However, due to challenges arising from the migration, we've decided to postpone this task to the coming weeks to prevent further disruptions.
Your feedback matters
As previous changes to X over the last year have meant that the value of engaging with communities in X has decreased, we hope that these changes will not significantly impact your overall social media engagement strategy.
We’d love to hear from you if it does so that we can consider this as we consider how we move forward from this point.
Thank you for your understanding and please let us know should you have any questions that are not addressed in the information above.
