I’m curious if the benefits outweigh the potential costs too, in another topic this week we saw that the translate API racked up a $1000 bill for one site through language detection alone.
If your site is so large that you rely on a topic indicator for sentiment, the potential costs in generating that little traffic light could be considerable.
Google does structure the pricing quite differently to Translate. Sentiment analysis in the NLAPI is $1 for 1000 units of up to 1000 characters, so each reply will be a minimum of one unit. As each reply would need to be scored separately, every response is one unit minimum. At a very rough guesstimate it’s maybe 1/8th the cost of the translate API, but that’s still a fairly big number to substitute staff who interact with the posts bring written.