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Commercial Licensing FAQ

What is the commercial license?

The Sentiment140 commercial license allows you to use the API for business purposes. The cost starts at $200 USD per month for classifying up to 1 million tweets per day. If interested, please contact us. 

What billing do you support?

We support credit card billing and monthly invoicing.

How long will you provide the Sentiment140 API?

Sentiment140 was established in 2008 and we have made investments to provide our services for the long term. In the unlikely event we decide to shut the API down, we would provide a 1 year notification.

How can I share the API key among multiple end users?

In addition to the appid parameter, you may include a clientid. The clientid should be a unique identifier for your end users, such as an email address or user id. This way, if we see abuse for a given appid and clientid, we can notify you about the offending user.

For example, John at Apple is distributing an iPhone app that's used by different users. The app uses the JSON Bulk Classification API. Mark, a customer, uses the app on his iPhone. The app on his device sends API requests to the following endpoint:

http://www.sentiment140.com/api/bulkClassifyJson?appid=john@apple.com&clientid=mark@gmail.com

In this URL john@apple.com is the main contact for the app, and mark@gmail.com is the end user. You may URL-encode the appid and clientid values.

What is your rate card?

Below is the rate card for the Sentiment140 API service:

 Classification Volume License fee
 1 million tweets per day $200/month 
 2 million tweets per day $400/month
 3 million tweets per day $600/month
 4 million tweets per day $800/month

How do I collect tweets?

It's a violation of Twitter's Terms of Service for Sentiment140 to redistribute tweets. There are two avenues for collecting tweets from Twitter:
  • The Twitter Streaming API allows you to track specific keywords. For example, you could track all mentions of the term "basketball." This is the recommended way to harvest tweets.
    • Advantages
      • Twitter's preferred mechanism for developers to collect tweets.
    • Disadvantages
      • The Streaming API only allows you to collect data moving forward. It's not possible to collect historical data.
      • Rate limited to 1% of the firehose (source)
      • Imprecise querying (e.g., there is no support for AND or OR operators).
  • The Twitter Search API allows you to search tweets by keyword.
    • Advantages
      • Allows you to retrieve historical tweets
      • Precise keyword querying (e.g., the AND and OR operators are supported).
    • Disadvantages
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