Twitter could make TweetDeck a Twitter Blue-exclusive paid feature: Report

Twitter could be planning to make TweetDeck a paid feature according to security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who discovered code and web pages that are designed to stop non-paying users from accessing it.
Originally an independent application that was later acquired Twitter, TweetDeck is aimed at power users and helps them manage and organise their feeds, send and receive tweets and direct messages, and view profiles like other clients for the platform. TweetDeck can be used on desktop browsers, or through the TweetDeck apps for Chrome and macOS.

Twitter is filling in the new @TweetDeck signup page that they’re working on. Two new highlights:
1. A link for “the legacy version of TweetDeck” (even though it might be deprecated at some point in the future)
2. “Ad-free experience” being marketed as the selling point 😛 https://t.co/XP6sYsTUGM pic.twitter.com/fRc0ujZ7o2
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 30, 2022
Twitter Blue is Twitter’s paid subscription service that costs $2.99 a month and is currently available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The subscription gives users access to features like Undo Tweet and NFT profile pictures for subscribed iOS users.

Wong discovered code that is designed to redirect users without Twitter Blue to a sign-up page that advertised TweetDeck as a “powerful, real-time tool for people who live on Twitter” with an ad-free experience. According to Wong, the page also contained a link designed to send users to a legacy version of TweetDeck.
While Twitter hasn’t explicitly stated that they are going to make TweetDeck a paid feature, there have earlier been reports about the company planning to build a paid version of the same.
Even though the page discovered Wong refers to an ad-free experience, Twitter Blue is not ad-free. In its FAQ about the service, Twitter justifies this saying that it needs to continue to run ads to Twitter Blue to offset the increased cost of operation for adding layers to the platform’s experience.