Is making a Twitter-based SaaS a good deal considering its API prices?
Hello IHs,
I have just started building 'Bettertweet' which is a twitter-based content creation and management tool powered by AI technology.
We have recently made our landing page live.
Visit here: https://bettertweet.io
The SaaS will contain features like
- AI-generated engaging tweets
- Grammatical or language error correction
- Tweet scheduling.
- Some content creation tools for twitter like: Summarization of articles into thread or tweet, Tweet capture tool which lets you capture a tweet and let you frame it as an image to share.
- Idea board feature to write down your tweet idea before you forget about it.
We are facing some problem regarding twitter API as the new API prices for it are insane.
They say,
"We are also launching a new Basic (v2) access for hobbyists with 10,000 GET/month and 50,000 POST/month, 2 app IDs, and Login with Twitter for $100/month. "
- @TwitterDev (Twitter)
They call it 'Hobbyists' plan.
On the other hand, Twitter Enterprise API packages start at $42,000 per month for its lowest subscription tier and goes up to $210,000 per month.
Is it right or I've mistaken it for wrong. Won't this affect small twitter-based SaaS?
Share your views and some suggestion or feedback for my new SaaS project.
Thanks & peace.
Hi, the difference is huge! I visited the website and it looks promising. As others said, I would start with the hobbyist tier also. How much requests on average you have per user? Maybe you can try to reduce it using cache and more :)
It is known in the startup world that making a consumer product profitable is a very hard task. But I'm pretty sure that if you provide value with a good product, you can make 100$ a month easily.
The main problem I see with your product is that honestly, the free and Standard plans don't offer much. You can check grammar and language mistakes in another free tool and save future ideas in a notepad. The juicy stuff is the AI generated tweets. I'd put less tweets in the free and standard tiers and include the AI tweets in all the tiers. I think that will help you get more subscriptions.
If you have 50k post requests a month and your users tweet an average of 300 tweets a month, you have a cap of 166 users. If we assume they get the standard plan that is $1.660. Another reason to lower the tweets in the standard plan.
The ideal scenario would be having a lot of subscribers that tweet very little. Twitter API sounds very expensive and building around it might not be the best idea. If suddenly your userbase starts using your app a lot more and start tweeting more, you might have to upgrade your twitter API plan without having increased your revenue.
Best of luck!
Yes definitely we need to brainstorm our pricing plans and make it more convenient to users and us.
Thanks for your insightful suggestion.
Learned things 💯
Hello Ankita,
Your idea of building "Bettertweet," a Twitter-based tool for content creation and management powered by artificial intelligence, sounds very interesting. I'm glad to hear that you have already launched your landing page and started working on this project.
The features you plan to include in your SaaS, such as generating engaging tweets through AI, grammar or language correction, tweet scheduling, and content creation tools for Twitter, seem to be valuable for users looking to optimize their experience on the platform.
I understand that the pricing of the Twitter API poses a challenge for small Twitter-based SaaS services due to its high costs. Understanding these expenses and their impact on your project is crucial. It would be worth thoroughly exploring the different plans and pricing options available for developers and finding an optimal solution that allows you to maintain the competitiveness of your tool.
I would like to ask if you have considered exploring alternative sources of funding or business models that could help cover the costs of the Twitter API. There are various strategies, such as subscriptions, bundled offerings, or collaborations with other platforms, that can provide additional revenue streams.
I wish you the best of luck in further developing the Bettertweet project! I look forward to future updates and the successes you will achieve with your Twitter-based SaaS.
Best regards and all the best!
Hey Ankit - the prices between the two twitter tiers are wild. I would start with the hobbyist and see how it goes. The gap is way too big, they have to build some intermediate pricing soon.
Shameless plug, but I've been hit with runaway API fees from too many companies which inspired me to build https://supergood.ai . It tracks your cost, usage and performance for the API's you pay for, like Twitter and drops in your codebase with only two lines.
I'm happy to hook you up with a free account if you're interested.