Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month | Hacker News Reader

Twitter launches new Pro tier for $5000/month

developer.twitter.com

49 pointsdanols97 comments

$100/month strikes me as a “we don’t want you” price. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can justify it but it will immediately turn away a hell of a lot of people. Maybe this was the point? Reduce API users to only the most motivated people/organizations and expect that many of them will grow into the next tier?

Seems like there should be a few more tiers, but the posting rate one needs to require the $100 tier lends that the platform is becoming a core part of your business, etc. Maybe it'll slow some of the bot trolls. etc too.

Totally agree, this reads as "go enterprise or GTFO"

I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear.

> I think they're probably just overwhelmed with bots, spammers, and "growth hackers". Growth hackers seem to a always think they can seed their user base by aggressive following and spamming their links on every popular thread. They can still do that, but now they gotta pay 100 a month. I bet 90% of them disappear.

Maybe this will come as a surprise to you, but spammers aren't using the official API.

Yes, this does come as a surprise to me. Which API are they using?

TBH, if it were me, I'd probably be using something like playwrite/puppeteer against a real instance of Chrome browser. I mean, you won't get the scale/throughput of the Enterprise API, but probably good enough with browser profiles to be able to mostly fool Twitter and do what you need/want.

That said, the free tier is probably good enough if you're relaying posts/information for most legit users, and the $100/month tier probably isn't good enough for businesses centered around deep Twitter API usage. Probably a net positive for society overall.

Aside: I'd rather pay $5-10/month for an ad free experience (there's so many of them now) than the blue checkmark and related features.

I'd assume the private API the phone apps use. Using the public API would rather be announcing "HELLO, I AM A BOT" in 6 foot tall neon letters.

Twitter and their V1 api was one of the reasons I fell in love with programming and automation.

Today "For hobbyists or prototypes" you pay $100. A month!

It's sad.

For me it was reddit's api. That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform! There has to be a cost so that an equilibrium between demand and availability is attained.

Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world. Maybe they could add special student pricing for student hobbyists. Aren't they also still doing a free option that's reasonable for testing out the api?

$100 is way too expensive for the bulk of the world’s population. And that gets you just 10,000 tweets per month read limit.

Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore. Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

I agree with what you're saying at a high level - there's no such thing as free lunch forever, but I disagree sharply in terms of cost/scale necessary for profitability.

$100/mo gets a hobbyist:

- Low-rate limit access to suite of v2 endpoints

- 3,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the user level

- 50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level

- 10,000/month Tweets read-limit rate cap

Elon talks about the average size of a tweet as 100 bytes (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065?lang...) so we're talking about writing 5.3MB of data and reading 1MB of data per month.

There's no world where that costs $100, $10, or even $1. My GoogleFi plan costs me $10/1GB.

It's wildly apparent that Twitter is overstating the value of the service they provide to the detriment to their users. They aren't trying to offer break-even prices for hobbyists.

There's more to posting/saving a tweet than just the data sent over the wire. There's many indexes, notifications and other analysis that happens. The free tiers of the API usage are what was bringing Twitter to it's knees in terms of overhead, not the actual users.

And bots using a browser with actual interaction patterns that at least resemble a person (not pulling through hundreds of messages in under a half a second or posting in 10ms after the form loads) is much more of a throttle, especially with per-ip rate limiting in place than the raw API access.

> Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic.

You seem to have a really skewed sense of how Twitter's API actually works, and you also seem to be under the incredibly incorrect impression that the API has no rate limiting.

Like most services, Twitter actually saved money by offering a free API with OAuth, because the alternative is for people to use web scrapers and direct access by password, which is orders of magnitude more expensive both due to direct network traffic costs and due to the security costs of people/apps doing insecure things to get around the lack of an API.

> Yeah, but if the bulk of the world's population is slamming an api that's free...there's no more api or platform at that point, since it's not going to generate enough revenue anymore.

This is literally an argument for requiring all Twitter users to pay to use the service, since the official apps all use the same API.

From a systems engineering point of view you want people hitting an API for programmatic requests. The alternative isn’t “The bots magically go away”, they just get more sophisticated, mix in with and impersonate user traffic, and become impossible to properly rate limit without collateral damage. APIs are for the benefit of the service provider as much as they are for developers.

This misses the point that the op is making: $100/minus cost prohibitive for anybody looking to use the API casually or explore deeper integrations for it.

You might be able to get a solo developer to pay $5 - $20 USD per month to trial something, but few will be willing to drop $1.2k/year for marginal gains.

I honestly think they don't care if they turn off developers. The core of their platform is advertising, and API users don't see the ads. I'm also guessing that API usage dramatically outweighs actual users in the past. And while I'd rather see an ad free paid tier, I get it... they were dramatically over-valued and the expenses needed to be reigned in from where they were. It was unsustainable.

I'm not sure that I understand the downvotes... Unless the suggestion is the twitter management absolutely cares about small/indy developers or that they didn't need to cut expenses.

Because its a decision made by someone who clearly has no idea how modern web traffic works. That pricing model looks fine in a world where scrapers and proxies don’t exist. But in our world, they do exist, and small time devs will happily pay $5 for a handful of proxies and scrape the data they want from Twitter directly. You can’t really block them either, especially if they’re indeed small time devs who are just scraping casually.

These devs using scraping tools are loading up entire profiles and tweets, which consumes far more resources than a simple API call that gives them the precise information they want.

Cheap APIs discourage scraping and are most cost effective if you work out the tiers and rate limits.

And my point is that they don't care about the $5/month devs. And the scrapers or intermediaries will just expend their own resources. With less overhead on Twitter's backend.

It's pretty easy to throttle browser requests without anyone noticing and blocking excess requests from a single IP block.

That you think they should care, doesn't mean they actually do.

> Could take the entire platform with it if all of the available funds are going towards serving free api traffic

Bro... Twitter can definitely handle the traffic generated by developers using their APIs. I doubt it even registers on their dashboards.

No one is asking for free unlimited access. There’s a jump off point between $0 and $100.

Twitter goes from 0 to 100 to…5000

That’s not reasonable. That’s just plain hostile.

> That being said, they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever.

They did, for most of Twitter's history

> ...otherwise everyone's gonna just constantly use them to the detriment of the entire platform!

On the contrary, the free availability of the Twitter API is inarguably what drove the growth of Twitter as a platform. Twitter benefited far more from it than the low marginal costs of operation. It's not even close.

I pay $200 a year ($17 a month) for access to a large, productive portion of VMWare's datacenter stack through VMUG. 6x that for access to a social media API is a terrible deal. At $100/mo, Twitter is basically saying "We don't want your business".

That is more likely the case here. They don't see profit from their side to make lower level access between the free and $100/mo tier as worth it... and would rather see corporate backed developers who are likely to have 5+ figure annual contracts than deal with tens of thousands of $10-20/mo subscribers disproportionally using the system.

Those $100 would have been barely enough for testing some things. That's more than my spending limit has been as 13yo.

Sure I get what you mean, and I couldn't care less about today's twitter.

But it still makes me sad to know that in today's work. 13yo me without PayPal or credit card wouldn't have any of that fun. And I imagine millions of people can't either.

The $100/mo API has extremely shit limits on top of being prohibitively expensive for prototyping. This will kill the mere idea of building anything on Twitter's API. Low friction and upfront costs are important for hobby projects and experimental prototypes.

In this day and age it's expected that companies have generous free tiers for hobby/prototype usage, and it makes sense because it usually costs them pennies to provide it.

Serving API requests is extremely cheap and the volume is almost always going to be so insignificant that they wouldn't even be able to tell if developers are using the API if not for API keys.

> they can't be expected to provide free or low-cost apis across the board forever

They _could_ if it supported people building stuff that increased engagement so they could sell more ads.

I think it's mistaken to think of free-to-access APIs as something the company 'gives' to users at some cost to itself. Done well, it facilitates making the platform a richer place, where people spend more time and attention, and which is therefore more valuable. It's hard to do the attribution to definitely say k% of timeline views (and thus ad impressions) wouldn't have happened without API-dependent stuff, but that doesn't mean it's 0%.

Some categories of examples of stuff that I think formerly contributed to engagement but which would just not get built today:

- write only twitter-bots which give information on e.g. earthquakes, public transit delays, in a way which is genuinely informative, and does not enrich the author(s).

- interactive twitter bots which made twitter itself better to use. The most important in this category may have been Threader, which was ultimately acquired by twitter. But it would have been useless / never written under the new rules. Can you imagine trying to call it, and receiving no reply b/c it had exceeded its limit for the day?

- interactive twitter bots which made twitter a platform from which to do other stuff. E.g. your.flowingdata.com was a self-tracking project where you recorded information by tweeting. Treating twitter as a platform, and orienting itself around tracking routine stuff meant that using this project _required_ you to frequently engage with twitter. This was also a free offering, which wouldn't have existed under the current limits.

An ecosystem in which there are high costs to building means less stuff will be built, and the platform overall is less interesting, less compelling, less worth scrolling through an ad to see. Thinking of these APIs as just a cost center is misguided.

> Tbh, $100 a month for a hobby project or prototype is not the end of the world

It's the end of that hobby project, at least for me.

Then they could provide it for a year, or six months, or one month.

twitter currently makes it's money from advertising served on content users generate, creating barriers around programmatically serving that content reduces the value of the platform for advertisers.

twitter is, I guess, looking to switch to a subscription based model, but paid subscription models make the most sense when the content is exclusive in some sense, and create barriers for entry, especially for folks from outside the wealthier nations.

The shear amount of floundering that twitter has done since Elon bought it is hilarious as a non-user. I do feel bad for the people who just like using twitter though, like every other week the checkmark means something different. I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now. Elon really knows how to shake up a company! And by shake up I mean destroy one step at a time.

For quite some time, crypto scams and fake airdrops were literally showing up under sponsored posts. There was a big (real) Arbitrum airdrop and for for days, I would see ads for a (fake) airdrop.

While I think the app and service has gotten much worse in several ways post-Elon, I do see way less crypto spam than before FWIW. The "For You" tab now actually sometimes even surfaces tweets I'm interested in too now.

Performance and general stability has absolutely fallen for me though, and the launch of the DeSantis campaign on Twitter was a technical embarrassment/disaster as far as I could tell.

For me, the Twitter Blue boost has really led to a general drop in quality. I find that Blue subscribers typically don't say valuable things and are some of the most uninteresting people on the app, and yet they get boosted right to the top.

My experience is the same. Look at any POTUS or White House tweet (or a tweet from any well-known left-of-centre account) and it's reply after reply full of vitriol and hate, all pushed to the top.

It's remarkable, and sad.

To be fair, it's the same for any right-of-center account as well. The vitriolic are engaging with opposition as much as anyone. It definitely plays in both directions.

My own take, is I'd like to see the establishment sellouts pushed out at far greater and faster rates, even though I don't necessarily agree with many positions, I don't like the corporatist sellouts and most politicians reach that point within a single term of federal office. There are grassroots efforts in both D & R camps to do just that.

That doesn't even get into the deep establishment in terms of Military Industrial Complex or Pharma/Food revolving doors in place. It's kind of gross. It's honestly at a point, that even if I'm in favor of more Libertarian solutions, while others want Socialism, most can agree, the establishment needs to go first, then can debate on longer term reforms.

Agreed, this is a very fair point. I'm also sad at the voices that have been lost one way or another through this transition.

I tend to prefer the "Following" tab for the most part... yeah, you may miss some tweets, but at least what I see are more of what/who I care to see.

This was inevitable, and anyone who had ever used social media could have told him that it was a _terrible_ idea. In general, people who have to pay for attention, almost by definition aren't worth paying attention to.

My For You tab is excellent. But as to the rest I have to disagree. I get the same number of spam DMs, and I don't see better replies to big accounts. They are real people, but they're tiny follower and accounts who aren't relevant but paid for blue.

I agree the For You tab is quite good, and is certainly better than the "recommended" tab was pre-acquisition. I wouldn't normally like being a "reply guy," but the For You tab ensures that even with hardly any followers, I can get targeted engagement when posting a reply on an extremely niche subject like package.json exports or iptables. And in turn, the algorithm responds by showing me more of that content in the future. That's the sort of positive feedback loop I appreciate, and one that will encourage more people like me (< 200 followers) to engage with Twitter.

However, it also seems to interpret "hate viewing" as "high interest" in terms of engagement. Sometimes I'll look at an account just one time, often by searching for it, in order to see some Tweet that's in the news or generating controversy. And then a few days later I'll start seeing Tweets from similar accounts in the "for you" tab, which I definitely don't want to see.

On other websites with recommendation algorithms, like YouTube, I can avoid this effect by viewing ragebait content in an incognito window, effectively curating my algorithm by opting out of it for content I don't want affecting future recommendations. But I can't do that with Twitter, because the login wall requires authentication to view more than the top three replies to a tweet. I wish there were some way to give the algorithm more intentional feedback on its recommendations.

> While I think the app and service has gotten much worse in several ways post-Elon, I do see way less crypto spam than before FWIW

Cryptocurrency spam has declined simply because the cryptocurrency markets have tanked.

Overall spam is way, way worse than before, and it's shockingly low-effort. My DMs are absolutely useless - just chock full of obvious bot accounts who want to "date" me and just need me to click a link first.

I used to get one of those every few months, rare enough that it would surprise me. Since December or so, I've been getting multiple every day.

EDIT: In the one minute it's been since I wrote this comment, I just received yet another.

I just block any follows or messages from obvious bots... it's a low signal, but with enough doing the same, it's better. I do wish there was a separate "block spammer/scammer" button as well, as trying to report anything is just frustrating. VS blocking someone I find toxic to interact with imo, shouldn't negatively effect them nearly as much as an account that's a scammer/spammer.

Elon put a dogecoin logo in place of the twitter logo. It's the most obnoxious crypto spam imaginable next to projecting a logo of it on the moon. The reason for other crypto spam falling is because they're competitors. Same thing he did with substack.

> The shear amount of floundering

On the other hand, this looks to me like trying all sorts of things to see what will work.

Most annoying thing is blue checks being boosted to the top of every thread. Especially since most blues in my replies are either scams or harassment. So I just hide all blues and tell them to pay me $8 to be visible, lol.

For me, it's better.

They removed the annoying login pop-up.

I only interact with twitter using links from other platforms. I don't use the trending hashtags or search.

So for me, it's been better since Elon took over.

I still see the popup when not logged in. Every time.

>I hear the trending tab is overrun with crypto spam now

Wasn't that already a problem before he took over? I seem to recall Joe Biden hawking some crypto scam after Twitter's admin got catfished into giving a third party access to his account.

He cut Twitter's expenses significantly while avoiding reliability issues (a feat that debunked several predictions by tech "experts" on HN about potential major outages) and while adding several new useful features. Admittedly, his decision to unban several controversial figures was debatable from a business standpoint, at least in the short term. However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, based on principles rather than profits.

Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.

>his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits

For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.

>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

My understanding is that Elon's position is to defer to the law regarding speech. So it would make sense that censorship is increasing in some countries while decreasing in others. In the US, Twitter was previously censoring a lot of legal speech and I believe that's what mostly concerned him.

Edit: I perhaps used "free speech" a bit ambiguously in the previous comment. I edited it to "principles" to avoid causing more debate about semantics.

It makes sense if he only cares about certain types of speech. Given he censors more overseas than previous Twitter leadership did (without getting banned) - it's really hard to argue he is motivated by principles rather than politics and money.

Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop with this pretending?

I can't say I have followed this enough to form a strong opinion, but let's say you are right, what would be an alternative motivation? Can we at least agree that this wasn't a decision driven purely by short-term profits? And can we agree that it was done at some personal cost? For example, his public image taking a big hit. Surely, Elon must have anticipated the impending backlash from both advertisers and mainstream media.

We can certainly agree on that. I think the problem is that he's now motivated by ego above all else. Elon is... different.

>However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, underscoring his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits.

Why did the same commitment to speech over profit not apply to his decision making when he filtered Substack, or Mastadon URLs?

My understanding is that Elon is mainly interested in eliminating ideologically and politically motivated censorship. He has recently given an interview on what he calls the "woke mind virus"[0], in which he talks about his views on free speech. Banning links to a Twitter competitor would not necessarily be inconsistent with this objective.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFEaTk--tZo

It's certainly not consistent with being a "free speech absolutist", which was the descriptor he gave himself.

The first definition I found on "free speech absolutist":

> Free speech absolutists believe that any limitation on political speech is veering into dangerous territory. They believe that restricting free speech in any way, including curbing insulting or factually incorrect speech, means assigning gatekeepers who decide what can and cannot be expressed in public.

Twitter's censorship policy does seem to have moved in that direction in general.

But I grant you that the terms are a bit overloaded and it's not always clear what people mean by them.

PS: Edited "free speech" to "principles" since it was causing much debate about semantics.

Twitter has been falling over during even moderate load this year, and completely crapped out last night during Musk's embarrassing soiree for Ron DeSantis. Musk is a bootlicking clown who deserves every bit of mockery he gets.

Twitter didn't "completely" crap out. There was a slight hiccup when a Twitter Space event was delayed by 20 minutes as engineers worked to accommodate the unexpected load. But speaking from personal experience as a daily Twitter user, I've noticed no significant issues post-takeover.

This type of exaggeration perfectly illustrates the mainstream media's tendency to perpetuate misinformation about Twitter. It contributes to the false narrative that Elon's stewardship is 'destroying' Twitter, which is far from reality.

Using "the mainstream media" as a bogeyman was tired 20 years ago, and it's even more tired these days. We can view Elon Musk's own depredations plainly on Twitter itself, with no "mainstream media" involved, and the evidence of Twitter's decline (that just so happens to correlate with Musk's takeover) can be observed directly on Twitter as well, with blue-checked right wing fruitcakes boosted to the top of every timeline, shrieking about trans people and "white replacement" in an attempt to foment violent hatred against the current crop of undesirables. But please, continue to delude yourself into thinking that "mainstream" media is the problem here.

Considering your strong disagreement with Elon's stance on content moderation and free speech, might it be possible that your perception of Elon 'destroying' Twitter stems more from personal bias, or 'wishful thinking', rather than a balanced appraisal of the facts? It's hard to know for sure as an outsider, but it would personally surprise me a lot if Twitter was in fact dying.

Would pre-elon Twitter have handled 500k in one Twitter space? :)

Considering that Twitter's infrastructure team was gutted and all the current infrastructure is the work of pre-Elon Twitter: yes, by definition.

Do they _want_ people to use it, or is this pricing specifically to get people to not use the API without having to actually announce they're killing it? They can let the API decay and this pricing will mean that its decline will be visible and relevant to far fewer people.

That's a lot of money for a service that currently has single-nine availability.

I don’t want to scrape, but at these price points, small projects where I only need basic user profile data are simply more cost effective with scraping.

Some very dumb decisions with their API pricing. How do you go from $0 to $100 to $5,000?

When scraping with good expensive proxies is effectively cheaper than using the API the company is doing something wrong

Or right, depending on your perspective.

Serving API calls is way cheaper than serving scraper bots that load up the full page.

The site doesn't mention how many profile lookups are allowed per month at the given tiers... how many user profiles are you looking up? Does this include tweets/retweets?

As for the pricing, it's likely they really don't want anyone unlikely to hit the upper tier to even try developing against their APIs to begin with.

I can't be the only person who noticed the double space in the first bullet point...

Anyways, while I understand wanting to monetize their API instead of having it just be used by tons of people for free, the tiers here just seem like insanity. This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model. $100 for a hobbyist? I personally can't remember the last time I paid $100 on a monthly basis for any non-essential service that I was using as a hobby. Would be interested to see the amount of customers each one of these tiers was actually fielding...

>This might be one of the few instances where I'd actually be happier with a usage-based billing model.

Why 'few instances'? I'd always prefer an API to be pay per request. It's my favourite thing about OpenAI (if you ignore the fact that big players can get access to the base model through Azure).

I mean if they hypothetical company X has some tier that is extremely lenient with their limits and would likely end up cheaper than a pay-as-you-go model, I generally prefer going that route. That plus it also gives me some degree of certainty that if something erroneous happens I don't have the potential to end up spending $XXX or more.

The "Use Cases" they list are hilariously vague and devoid of content.

"build for fun" indie musician paying $100/mo for twitter

It's like paying $100 a month to be able to publish your fart noise app on the Apple Store.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment but if you're under the presumption the Apple Developer membership is $100/mo then I wanted to clarify it's actually $100/yr for Apple Developer (it's actually 99 but I'm not going to play semantics).

Thanks for unpacking it, I read that as their exact point.

Apple is $100 for a whole year, while Twitter is $100/month.

Aka Twitter is way overpriced by comparison.

I thought it was $100/year, thanks for clarifying.

That makes Twitter 12x more expensive. Wild.

Aside: Elon's got this all wrong. The checkmarks and other pricing tiers only weed out the dupes and conmen.

Traditionally, a list of people that are dumb enough to do really dumb things and that have disposable income is very valuable. Having a list of known rubes isn't something you share, for free, to anyone. You charge a lot of money for that list, usually.

But here's Elon, just giving away that list for anyone to see.

Could this actually be a good thing for the Twitter bot problem?

Are re-tweets/likes considered a tweet in the tweet limits?

I'm not a heavy Twitter user or developer just a curious bystander and definitely don't have details into the "buy retweets" ecosystem so not sure if the "buy retweets"/buy social cred were using this type of API, humans or webscraping type scripts.

Hopefully this means feedly pro can support twitter integration again. In mean time, anyway aware of working method to turn tweets from a public list into a daily email digest? A couple methods I use to depend on died with API access gone. Or any app that reads a twitter list via TTS.

A whopping additional app ID for the low, low price of an additional $4900/mo!

This seems like a good way to create a gray market of "unofficial" Twitter "API" providers that charge $100 per month to automate Twitter with reverse engineered mobile API endpoints.

What surprises me most is that Twitter doesn't appear to have anything that allows you post ads only to Twitter Blue subscribers.

They are a set of users comprised almost entirely of absolute morons who believe everything they read online and also have money to spend on stupid buillshit like Twitter Blue, they are a goldmine for advertisers and this oppurtunity to bilk them of all their cash is just wasted.

I would be curious to see whether developers fall in line or have learned from the past.

This is for people than need to flow money to Elon under the guise of a valid business transaction.

Effort spent on lower tiers takes away from higher tiers that make actual amounts of money for twitter.

They don't want the $10/mo student because realistically that student is only going to be a drain on Twitter.

They want the $100/mo "amateur" who has an actual shot at growing to a $1000/mo or beyond tier. If they don't blow up they want that user to stop paying and being a net-drain on Twitter's constrained and expensive (man-hours) resources.

Further they want to price out some bad actors. See cheating differential in free vs. paid games.

Look I disagree strong with Twitter's direction and leadership - but this pricing ain't the hill to die on.

Except without those free accounts, the others have no value. Who's going to spend $5000/month so they can talk to only other people who pay $5000/month?

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