Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
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An API is like a website that computer programs access. In the case of twitter, you had the public site that everyone uses a browser to get to, and you had the API site that programs access. In a recent college class, I wrote a computer program that connected to twitter’s api and downloaded several years worth of content from a producer called ‘weratedogs’. I analyzed that data to look for patterns. Now, I could have clicked through every post that ‘weratedogs’ posted, but that would take forever. I can make a program do it in like 2 minutes via API access.
An API subscription is a fee you pay to access such an API. APIs aren’t free to the provider, they have to pay for the internet, the internal infrastructure, the employees who work on it, increasingly disastrous cloud computing bills, etc, And since you can’t run advertising on it like you do with web content, you need to charge for access so you don’t lose money.
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