Perhaps, but if they had a plan to monetize 3rd party clients, then the first people they'd want to sign up would be existing clients with developed products and an install base. Instead it seems they just silently killed them.
Perfectly reasonable would be telling their existing API users “we will revoke your access to the APIs you are using and will introduce a new program where you have to pay a bit more to use them” with some kind of notice period that overlapped with the introduction of the new program.
What they did was suddenly yank access for a handful of apps then go silent for four days, before sending an email out to API users for (maybe?) a new program which we can’t be 100% sure was part of the plan or just an old scheduled mailer by a now-fired person. We are left guessing because nobody really knows what’s going on at Twitter any more.
The shutdown of the previous API is very relevant to monetization.
If you were subscribed to a free service and they released a paid version, would your choice of paying be affected by the fact that your free account was removed without warning?
What if you had built a business on the free account; would the sudden shutdown of your business affect your decision to build a new project on top of the paid product?
Monetization requires users trusting you enough to pay, eroding lack of trust as you reveal your paid product is a mountain sized red flag.
I don't think Twitter cares about free Twitter clients, or even commercial ones.
It's always amazed me that TweetDeck has existed for so long, but now if users aren't being monetized by ads or paying for (Blue) features in the Twitter app I can see them not being welcome on Musks Twitter.
