Twitter tool idea

So with the Twitter API pricing announcement, most small indie Twitter tools will be going out of business. $42,000 per month—almost half a million per year—for API access is just too much for mere mortals. The trade-off they had to make for networks effects over platform risk, and now platform risk had reared its ugly head.

The tool I’ve been using, Zlappo, is likely going down. 😢

So it’s a sad day for indies. Imagine building your SaaS for years, hitting thousands or tens of thousands in MRR… only to get rug-pulled like that. My heart goes out to those fellow indies. It sucks balls.

That also means I’m out in the market yet again for a new Twitter tool. This time, it’ll likely cost more due to the increase in costs for Twitter tools to run. So I’m not optimistic, even though a few of the survivors had not yet announced any price increases:

• Typefully
• Hypefury
• Tweet Hunter
• Black Magic
• Publer

It’s probably a bad time to think about building anything on Twitter… but that got me thinking of an idea: Twitter API has a free plan which is very bare bones – just 1500 tweets per month, media upload endpoints and login with Twitter. Very basic, but I’m not a super power user. I just need a tool to schedule a tweet, and auto-retweet it twice at a 8h time interval. No need for analytics, auto-DMs, AI writing tools, thread composer, none of those fancy bells and whistles.

I wonder if we can make a Twitter scheduler wrapper tool where we consumers sign up for a free dev account and bring our own API keys, very much like ChatGPT wrapper apps. Buy a one-time license for the app, download/install or open in browser, and run using your own API key.

I would buy that!

[Update:] From reading the docs, maybe the auto-RT features are not possible using the free plan. 🙃 Maybe someone can make a Twitter scheduler tool for intermediate users using the $100/month plan then? Just getting 10 customers on a $10/month plan would break even on the cost already. Surely the $100 plan can support 10 users?!