Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 (about Rwf 19,000) for the new Twitter Blue subscription, according to The Verge, a tech media firm.
This follows Elon Musk's acquisition of the social media platform and his first ultimatum to the employees: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users. This is according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.
The US media organisation also revealed that employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7 to launch the feature or they will be fired.
Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark.
Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots.
On October 30, he tweeted: "The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”
Platformer’s Casey Newton first reported that Twitter was considering charging for verification. A spokesperson for Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
Even though he is barely three days into being "Chief Twit,” Musk has moved quickly to make changes at Twitter, first by changing its homepage for logged-out users.
According to The Verge, with the help of Tesla engineers he has brought into Twitter as advisors, he’s also planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base.
The Twitter Blue subscription launched widely almost a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers and make other tweaks to the app, such as a different colour home screen icon.
In the few quarters that Twitter reported earnings as a public company after that debut, advertising remained the vast majority of its revenue.
Musk is keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue.