I didn't miss the point. Twitter does not want developers to go past that limit. Pay or no pay, it doesn't matter to Twitter. It's not part of the plan.

From the actual announcement:

"we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens"[0]

which sounds like "show us the money" to me. You can of course assert that "we want to talk to you" obviously means "we don't want to talk to you", but once you do so without evidence you're firmly in tinfoil hat territory.

[0] https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Of course they mean they want to talk to you. But that doesn't mean they want money. More likely they'd want to acqui(hi)re you and incorporate whatever made made you successful into their product.

Which in some sense is still wanting the money!

Glad to hear this was never a discussion. You should've just stated originally that you know exactly what twitter wants, and left it there.

Have you spoken with someone at Twitter about this? I have. If you haven't, there's nothing to discuss.

So you've specifically asked someone in a position to make those decisions at twitter, whether they'd considered taxing their API? and they told you explicitly "No, we want to cap API usage regardless if it can be a profitable channel or not"