The cheapest pay-as-you-go
Twitter / X API.

The number worth asking any vendor for is not uptime on a status page, it is what happens to YOUR job when a single call fails. We return a normal HTTP error rather than a partial body, so a failed call is retryable and cannot silently poison a batch, and a call that fails is still a call you were billed for, which is exactly why we would rather it errored loudly than returned half a page. Live availability and incident history are published on the status page and the changelog, so you can read the record rather than take a claim. A vendor with no public incident history is not a vendor that has never had one.

Three, and they compound. You skip the platform relationship entirely: no developer account, no app review, no tier to be moved off. You skip the maintenance: X changes its surface without notice, and absorbing that is our problem rather than a week of yours. And you get parsed, typed responses instead of HTML you have to keep re-deriving. What you give up is control over the extraction, and a per-call cost you would otherwise pay in proxies and engineering time. If you already run scraping infrastructure across many sites, that trade may not favour us.

One header. You send Authorization: Bearer with a key from your dashboard, and that is the whole handshake: no OAuth dance, no token refresh, no callback URL to register, and no X developer account behind any of it. Keys are per-account and rotate independently, so a leaked key is a key you revoke rather than an outage. Write actions on an account you control need that account connected first; reads need nothing but the key. Full detail on the quickstart.

They bill on different axes, which is why a headline comparison misleads. The official X API charges per distinct resource read and does not charge twice for the same post inside a 24 hour window, so a fast polling cadence is free and a broad backfill is expensive. We charge per request, so cost is exactly proportional to calls and a dense pull is cheap. The official API is also the only one that can give you contractual guarantees about provenance and deletion, and if your use case is regulated that decides it regardless of price. Everything else, cost and setup time and endpoint breadth, is laid out on Twitter API pricing.

You are billed for calls you make, and nothing else. There is no monthly minimum, no seat, no tier to outgrow and nothing to keep alive between projects. A read call is $0.0008 and returns about 20 tweets, so 1,000 tweets costs about $0.04, and a month where you make no calls costs nothing. Two consequences people are usually surprised by, so they are worth saying plainly: a call that comes back empty still counts as a call, because the work was done to answer it; and there is no volume discount to negotiate, because the first call and the ten millionth are the same price. Project your own number with the Twitter API Cost Calculator, or read the full breakdown on pricing.

TwitterAPIs gives you programmatic access to public X data: individual tweets, reply chains, full threads, user profiles, follower and following lists, and keyword search. Every supported route and its per-call price is listed on the TwitterAPIs Pricing page.

Billing is purely per call, with no monthly tier to commit to. Reads run $0.0008 a call and return roughly 20 tweets, which works out to $0.04 per 1,000 tweets; simple write actions run the same $0.0008 a call, and creating a tweet runs $0.0016. To project a real monthly figure for your workload, run the numbers through the Twitter API Cost Calculator or check the Twitter API Pricing Comparison.

Yes. Every new account starts with $0.50 in free credits, enough to make live calls right away, and we never ask for a card to begin testing.

For one-off scripts and quick experiments an unofficial Twitter API is fine, but anything you put in front of real users needs predictable uptime and a clear stance on platform policy. Weigh those tradeoffs in the Twitter unofficial API guide before you settle on a stack.

No. There are no X developer app credentials to apply for or maintain. Create an account, copy your key, and your first request can go out in minutes.

The Twitter API alternatives and X API alternatives page lays each option out side by side. Judge them on how they bill, how they treat rate limits, and how fast you can wire them into your code for the job you actually have.

One ceiling, and it is the same on every route: 600 requests per minute and 20 concurrent requests per API key. There are no per-endpoint quotas, no tier gates and no monthly plan, so any route is open to you at that rate for as long as your credits last. Going over returns 429 with a Retry-After header. The Twitter API Rate Limits Comparison shows how that differs from the throttling on the official X API.

The only personal details we keep are your email and name. Most routes are read-only against public data. For private reads and write actions such as like, retweet, bookmark, and follow, you either register an X session, which is stored encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM until you replace it, or pass one per request, which is never stored. Everything moves over encrypted HTTPS, and your data is never sold or shared. The full breakdown is on our Privacy & Data Handling page.