This week, Twitter has raised the price of its subscription service from $3 to $5, and the price increase is expected to affect current and new subscribers.
According to Twitter’s Help Center guide for Twitter Blue, subscribers with subscriptions that began before the price increase will keep being charged $3 per month until they “receive additional notice from Twitter and/or the payment providers at least 30 days before the new price goes into effect.”
Digital Trends screenshot/Twitter
Essentially, subscribers who were charged the initial $3 per month rate will be given some time to decide if they want to cancel their subscription or continue on with the increased monthly price of $5 per month. New subscribers (the ones who began after the price increase) will be charged the new $5 rate.
It’s also worth noting that the subscription price hike isn’t just for subscribers in the U.S., and other countries were mentioned as also being affected by the subscription price increase. These countries include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the Twitter Help Center guide screenshot above, you can see the expected changes in price for those countries.
Twitter also noted in its Help Center guide that the timing of price increases for new subscribers varied depending on their time zone, but generally speaking, the price hike went into effect for new subscribers “on July 27th or July 28th, 2022.”
For subscribers who signed up before the price increase, the effective date of the price increase is less clear. A specific start date for the new price for current subscribers was not mentioned in the Help Center guide. But! Some Twitter Blue subscribers shared screenshots of notifications they received about the price hike and it looks like the price will stay the same at $3 per month for them until October.
Is Twitter Blue worth the extra $2 per month you’d have to pay to subscribe to it? It depends on how much value you put on the special features it offers. Twitter is free but Twitter Blue is a paid subscription that offers access to features like the ability to organize your bookmarked tweets into folders, ad-free articles, the ability to customize the appearance of the mobile app’s icon and overall theme, and the ability to undo tweets you’ve sent. Twitter Blue subscribers also get early access to experimental features via Twitter Blue Labs.
As you can probably tell, some of these features are useful but some of them are a bit gimmicky and are just simple cosmetic options. Casual Twitter users may not need or want the premium features Twitter Blue offers. Power users, on the other hand, may find that Twitter Blue is worth the new $5 per month rate. But if you fall into the latter category, just be aware that $5 still doesn’t seem to buy you a completely ad-free Twitter experience. You’ll likely still see ads in Twitter Blue unless you’re using its ad-free articles feature which is only for certain articles and does not include the entirety of your Twitter experience.