The social media giant Twitter Inc. has announced that it intends to shutter free access to its application programming interface in a move to make more money for the platform. The company stated that the API, which is used by bots, researchers and useful tools, will be closing down and in favor of a “paid basic tier.”

“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1,” the company said late Wednesday. “A paid basic tier will be available instead.”

Twitter’s API provides fundamental functionality for accessing data from the social media platform for performing basic services such as retrieving and analyzing public data, and sending and receiving tweets and allowing third-party apps to connect to the platform.

“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have sent over a trillion Tweets, with billions more every week,” Twitter posted about the upcoming change. “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets. We’re committed to enabling fast & comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us.”

This change will affect numerous free apps and bots that run on the platform including bots such as Remind Me of This Tweet and apps such as Threadreader that create links to pages that “unroll” Twitter threads into more readable documents. Many bots also exist that just post pictures of cute animals, random daily quotes, and other novelty apps that do not exist to make money. All of these will applications be chased off the platform by this move.

Researchers and students also use Twitter’s API to scrape data from the platform in order to study statistics about what happens in the universe of social media including political views, hate speech and misinformation spread. This would make their jobs a lot more difficult if they were forced to pay for access.

Twitter has not revealed details on how much the basic tier will cost, but the company does offer a premium tier for developers that offers higher levels of API services for a price. Currently, developers can access the platform using that tier for between $149 and $2,499 a month and it provides a number of benefits over the current free “Sandbox” tier.

This news follows a recent move by Twitter to block third-party clients from its API, such as those that mimic Twitter’s already existing apps such as Tweetbot, which could automatically retweet posts, and Twitterrific, a full client for Twitter. The apparent reason for this action was to block third-party apps that do not display Twitter ads to users, the platform’s primary source of revenue.

After Twitter Chief Executive Elon Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion last year, he has made multiple efforts to increase revenue for the platform. These actions have included layoffs affecting 3,800 employees, roughly half its global workforce, and the closure of the company’s data center in Sacramento, California. The company also launched a revision of Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service, that allows anyone to receive a “verified” blue checkmark for $8 a month and a gold checkmark version for verified businesses.

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