Twilert (Twitter Alert Tool) Relaunches, But It’s Not Free Anymore

Filed in Social Media by Matt McGee on July 1, 2013 4 Comments

twilertI mentioned a tool called Twilert a few months ago in a post I wrote about using Twitter as a listening station. It’s a great service that lets you setup Twitter alerts based on keywords, Twitter usernames and more. And it was free.

Not anymore. ๐Ÿ™

Well, technically there’s still a free option, but it only allows one alert and only sends one email a day. Not so great if your small biz needs to do real-time tweet monitoring.

The relaunch was forced by Twitter’s new API. To be fair, the service also has several upgrades and new features to go along with the switch from free to paid. There are three plans ranging from $9 to $97 per month that determine what features you get.

I still like Twilert and I’ll still recommend it for businesses that want to know what’s being said on Twitter without having to actually be on Twitter to track things. But for me, personally, I can’t even justify the low-budget paid plan for monitoring my @mattmcgee mentions.

Comments (4)

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  1. Riza says:

    I think itโ€™s going to come to this. I mean the tool not being free anymore, especially because they know that only businesses will fully take advantage of it. Twitter is all business too, like any other social platform so I guess, they finally decided to earn from it too.

    Thanks for the update, Matt!

  2. David says:

    I work for the company that runs Twilert. Firstly, thanks for the recommendation. In the new version we’ve worked hard to include some functions that users had asked for including (near) real-time alerts and a searchable historic archive.

    We ran Twilert for free for years, but as it became more popular it was costing us a significant amount of money: sending millions of alerts each month, plus the ongoing development and customer service requirements. We just couldn’t justify supporting the service for free. We tried an advertising model for a bit but that didn’t help.

    Then when Twitter announced that it was deprecating its API we had two choices: either let it die, or invest more of our money in making it work with the new Twitter API and introduce a subscription model. We decided on the latter and included the new features that we knew would be welcomed by our users.

    Only time will tell if we did the right thing, but so far we’ve been really pleased with the response we have had. We hope that we can continue to provide people with a valuable tool (and cover our costs). Our aim is to keep investing in the product in response to what users tell us they need.

    Thanks again for writing about us.

    • Matt McGee says:

      Thx for explaining all that, David. I totally respect a company’s need to make money, can’t fault you for that. Worst thing is when companies just drop their products (i.e., Google Reader). Just wish I could justify the costs for my own personal alerts again.

  3. Kris says:

    Hi,

    Thanks for the nice post. Actually, I don’t have any problem with having to pay for twilert since it’s of great help. In business, it’s a give and take process. If we wanted to have the best service and all, we need pay for it, it’s an investment anyway.

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