Twitter thinks users would willingly pay almost double for undo send

Over the last few days, Twitter has emailed customers of its ‘Blue‘ subscription warning of an impending price hike — in Canada, the price is nearly doubling from $3.49/mo to $6.49/mo.

New subscribers will pay the higher price from the start, while existing users won’t see the increase until October. Several countries will see the increase, including the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, although prices differ between them.

Twitter Blue increased their subscription fee from $2.99 to $4.99 and didn’t even add the edit button

— MORGAN (@Helloimmorgan) July 29, 2022

Users were quick to criticize Twitter over the price increase, largely over the lack of value for the money. As a quick rundown, here are some of the features you get with Twitter Blue:

• An ‘undo send’ feature (a.k.a. a band-aid solution for the much-maligned lack of an edit button)
• Custom icons and navigation bar
• The ability to set a JPEG you paid way too much for NFT as your profile picture
• Ad-free articles (within the Twitter Blue Publisher network)
• A ‘Reader Mode’ for long tweet threads
• Folders for bookmarked tweets (imagine saving tweets, let alone so many you need to organize them?)
• Labs for early access to new features (like the aforementioned NFT profile pic)

Not sure about you, but $3.49 seemed like a stretch for most of these features. The only semi-useful feature is ‘undo send,’ and even that’s a tough sell — it’s just a streamlined version of the current solution for fixing tweets, which is tapping the delete button and typing it again.

“At launch, we felt strongly about keeping the cost of the subscription as low as possible while we tested, learned, and gathered feedback. We’ve since refined the vision for this product, conducted significant research, introduced new enhancements with more in development, and as such we are updating pricing,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

Maybe these “in development” enhancements will make the $6.49 price worthwhile, but as is, Blue is a collection of features that arguably should be part of the default Twitter experience. Well, except the NFT profile pics — those alone should cost money because it’s incredibly funny that people would pay for the digital equivalent of having a ‘kick me’ sign taped to their back.

Source: TechCrunch