Hootsuite – the much-loved social media networking utility  – has announced pricing plans ranging from free to $1500 a month. The question is this: will people pay it or will they jump ship to the likes of Tweetdeck? And isn’t it ironic that the add-on services seem able to make money off Twitter when Twitter itself can’t?

If you head here and here you’ll see that the pricing structures range from free (always popular) to $1499 (£960) for Enterprise level users with other options ranging from $4.99 – $99.99 (£3.20 – £64) with free allowing you to run up to five social networks but you’ll get adverts in your streams. Five’s a fair number as that gives people the chance to have Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, MySpace, LinkedIn which would cover the basics (though I think Facebook looks terrible in their interface).

It will be interesting to see how many sign up for it. This could be an opportunity for the likes of Tweetdeck, though Hootsuite have played it canny so that people signing up for even the $4.99 service are getting quite a bit – and I think that’s the business plan because if lots of their users sign up for that then they are quids in.

There’s two problems though – and one of them is out of their control.

Firstly, overly the last few months Hootsuite has had issues with Twitter API’s and there’s been times that it’s been hellish to try and get an update posted. Has there been any moves to resolve that? If not, why should people and companies pay for a service that isn’t always going to work as it should?

Secondly, if people are only using Hootsuite for access, for some it almost becomes the platform, so what happens when Twitter goes down? Hootsuite can’t control that but if people are paying Hootsuite for the service then they’ll expect that service to always be on.

And what about Twitter?

If this works and pays well for Hootsuite at what point does Twitter say “you’re charging people for access to our service, we want a cut of your cash or we’re blocking you off/throttling your traffic?”

Interesting times…