X Users Now Have to Pay for TweetDeck

Aug 18: X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has gotten rid of free access to its productivity-minded TweetDeck platform. Now renamed to XPro, the platform is only available as a perk in the X Premium subscription service.

A support account for the company known as X posted on July 3 that the change was coming and that in 30 days, users must be Verified -- aka, must pay $8 a month on desktop or $11 on Android or iOS for X Premium -- to access "a new, improved version" of what is now called XPro. 

Several of XPro's listed features have already existed in TweetDeck, while new perks include advanced search, continuing to watch a post's video while scrolling through XPro and choosing whether to view top posts or the latest posts in columns. 

The X Support post noted that Teams functionality would be unavailable and "restored in the coming weeks," but it's unclear if that has happened. X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is the latest in a series of changes to Twitter, now X, after Elon Musk acquired it in October 2022. Under his leadership, the company introduced a new subscription program and verification system before getting rid of Twitter branding and, most recently, changing X's app icon to look dirty and smudged for some reason.

The company formerly known as Twitter paid $40 million in 2011 to acquire TweetDeck, then a third-party desktop client popular with power users of the social media platform. But it may not have been all Musk's idea to restrict TweetDeck to only paid users -- a month before Musk made his initial bid for the social media platform, a March 2022 code leak suggested Twitter was looking into adding TweetDeck to its Twitter Blue subscription perks.

For now, visiting TweetDeck's old URL (tweetdeck.twitter.com) redirects users to X's homepage with a popup prompting them to subscribe to X Premium. Visiting Xpro.com leads to a completely different company. 

(CNET)