It's always cheaper, but it breaks theirs terms of service, and they may block you at any time. Not something any business will take lightly.

At that point, maybe businesses will stop caring. Especially in an era of cost cutting.

For the price Twitter is asking you could hire a team full time to maintain a scraper.

Well, one junior anyways...

Given how arbitrary their own decisions are (including breaching their own rental and other contractual agreements) i'd say its even odds.

Alternatively, create a business that wraps Twitter's public data/API and sell access to your API starting at $99/month. A sort of.... API arbitrage?

Surely you'd just immediately get sued into oblivion (unless musk fired all the lawyers too...)

I vaguely remember a court case that found "internet scraping" to be legal activity.

It's gone both ways. In the late 90's, I was a co-founder of Ruby Lane and we had an agreement with eBay to spider their site and they paid us for traffic. When they decided to end the contract, we removed them from our search engine.

But later, eBay successfully sued Bidder's Edge to prevent them from spidering eBay's site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge

Courts in later cases have disagreed with this ruling.

The bigger issue IMO is that it can get pretty hard to spider a site if they are actively trying to prevent you from doing it. It turns into a not-so-fun game of cat and mouse.