• Reports from people close to the matter suggest that a Twitter Blue price increase is on the cards.
• The price could allegedly go up to $11 per month to account for Apple’s fees for in-app purchases.
• Twitter Blue is yet to be relaunched as the social media platform tries to contend with manual verification of users.

While Twitter tries to throw attention to the Hunter Biden laptop debacle, which it handled incredibly poorly, many users are wondering where the relaunch of Twitter Blue is.

With the social media platform’s new owner recently discovering that Apple takes 30 percent from all in-app purchases, it looks like plans have been changing.

Not only was the relaunch kicked back until “there is high confidence of stopping impersonation” and new badges can be created, there also appears to be a price increase on the horizon.

Referencing a report from The Information (paywall), Reuters notes that Twitter Blue, when purchased via the Apple App Store payment system, may cost as much as $11.

This, according to both reports, is likely in response to the aforementioned cut Apple takes from in-app purchases. While Twitter has yet to confirm or deny this, the only official source of information from the company now appears to be Elon Musk’s Twitter account and reading tea leaves would yield more information.

We should point out that on Twitter Blue’s FAQ page, it is stated that $7.99 is an “introductory offer” so pricing can change at any time.

Should the price increase because of App Store fees however, users who make use of an Apple product could bypass this increased fee by simply signing up on their mobile browser rather than in the app. This is how Microsoft gets around App Store restrictions for Xbox Cloud Gaming.

With this having been said, we should point out that Google also charges up to 30 percent for in-app purchases which make use of Google Play’s billing system. This is however, a moot point as the new Twitter Blue isn’t available for Android.

The other reason Twitter Blue could increase in price could come down to Twitter needing to actually verify people. Following a disastrous initial launch which saw widespread impersonation, now Twitter has elected to manually check that a person is who they say they are.

This is how Twitter Verification used to work, but it was a slow and flawed process. Given that verification is not available yet, we suspect this aspect of the product is slowing things down.

Should the price of Twitter Blue increase, it will be the second such increase since Musk took over. Before he arrived, the service cost $4.99 per month after launching at $2.99 per month. When Musk took over the price was set at $7.99 per month. A second increase in such a short time would

What is still unclear is whether this new reworked Twitter Blue will be available globally. The subscription is currently only available to users in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Launching in other countries could have massive implications to the amount of money Twitter takes home. We’ve seen this from the likes of Facebook and Netflix where foreign exchange headwinds can severely impact profit margins in certain countries.

Given that Musk and his investors forked out $44 billion for Twitter, we doubt foreign exchange headwinds are a matter they want to contend with.