X API Pricing in 2026: Tiers, Free Credits and Per-Call Costs

Because the pricing model changed from free-with-limits to paid-by-resource, and the entry point moved a long way up. Free API access ended in early 2023, and what replaced it prices per distinct resource read rather than per request, with paid tiers starting far above what most hobby and indie projects had been paying, which was nothing. The stated reason was abuse and infrastructure cost. The practical effect for a builder is that the cheapest way to read a lot of public posts stopped being the official API, which is the whole reason a per-call market exists. Figures on this page were verified on 13 August 2026.

No, and there are two clean ways we lose. Our closest per-call competitor sells monthly plans that grant a credit balance, and on every one of those plans their effective rate per call is below ours: their $15 plan works out near $0.0005 a call, their $49 plan near $0.00041, their $99 plan near $0.00033, and lower again if you pay in crypto for the bonus credit. Their unused plan credit stacks on renewal rather than expiring, so the waste in a quiet month is the plan fee, not the balance. Their one-time $5 entry plan is the exception at about $0.00111 a call, which our flat rate beats. Separately, twitterapi.io meters per tweet returned at $0.00015 rather than per call, so any call that comes back with fewer than about five tweets is cheaper there than our $0.0008, which covers sparse polling and thin mention sweeps. We sell one metered rate of $0.0008 per call with no plan, no floor and nothing to keep alive, and a read call returns about 20 tweets. Break-even against the monthly plans is the plan fee divided by our rate, so below roughly 18,750 calls a month metered billing is the cheapest of these, and above roughly 123,750 calls a month their top plan is cheaper. Steady, predictable high volume favours their subscription. Dense pulls, bursty, seasonal, or one-off work favour us.

A per-call provider, by roughly two orders of magnitude. On the official X API 2 million post reads at $0.005 each is $10,000, and it consumes two thirds of the 3 million post read allowance for that billing cycle, so a second pull of that size in the same month needs an Enterprise agreement. On TwitterAPIs the same pull is 100,000 read calls at $0.0008 per call, about 20 tweets a call, which is $80. Our nearest competitor's list rate is $0.001 per call, so the same job is about $100 there, or $99 on their top plan, which grants $300 of credit and carries the unused two thirds forward while the plan stays active. On twitterapi.io the same pull is metered per tweet rather than per call, at $0.00015 a tweet, so 2,000,000 tweets is about $300. Dense pulls like this are where a per-call rate wins by the widest margin.

Across every endpoint family TwitterAPIs runs 5x to 15x below X's own rates. Take a single tweet read: it is $0.0008 here versus $0.005 on X, and because one call already bundles about 20 tweets, 10,000 calls pull roughly 200,000 tweets for $8. The same 10,000 reads run $50 on the official API.

At $0.0008 per call, with each call returning around 20 tweets, TwitterAPIs is the lowest-priced pay-as-you-go option going, which works out to $0.04 for 1,000 tweets. X, by comparison, bills from $0.005 for a single resource, north of 100 times more on a per-tweet basis.

X does run a free tier, but it is aimed at posting and hands you almost no reads, somewhere near 100 a month, which is nowhere near enough to gather tweets. The free path that holds up in practice is the $0.50 credit (about 625 calls) every TwitterAPIs signup receives with no card on file, after which you continue at $0.0008 a call, about $0.04 per 1,000 tweets on a full 20-tweet page.

Since the April 20, 2026 change, a plain text or media post is $0.015 per request on the official X API, but any post that carries a URL jumps to $0.20, close to 13 times the base rate. The surcharge hits everything with a link in the body, whether that is a newsletter, a blog post, an affiliate link, or a tracking URL, so if you automate link posts at scale that one line can swamp your write spend. TwitterAPIs charges one flat rate per call, $0.0016 to create a tweet, with no per-link surcharge no matter what the post body contains.

Not on a self-serve plan. In X's own announcement of the changes effective April 20, 2026, following, likes and quote-posts via API writes were removed from all self-serve tiers. The distinction matters when you are budgeting: those actions were not repriced upward, they were withdrawn, so there is no self-serve price for them at all. Any guide still quoting a per-request cost for an API follow or like is quoting a line item that no longer exists. Summoned replies were treated separately and held at $0.010 rather than taking the $0.20 URL rate.

Both stopped accepting new signups when X cut over to pay-per-use in February 2026, and Basic has since gone further than that. Basic had carried 50,000 posts and 15,000 reads a month; Pro had carried 300,000 posts, 1,000,000 reads, full-archive search, and the filtered stream. X then deprecated the legacy Basic plans outright, monthly and annual alike, and moved every remaining Basic subscriber onto pay-per-use from June 1, 2026 at the end of their billing cycle. So if you were on Basic, being grandfathered in is no longer the situation: your cost is now whatever your call volume prices out at. Pro is a narrower case, closed to new signups, and X has not publicly said whether it faces the same migration, so treat its future as open rather than settled. Above the 3 million monthly read cap you need Enterprise, which X does not publish a price for. TwitterAPIs has no tiers at all: a single $0.0008 rate per call, about 20 tweets each, regardless of volume.

Yes, on the official API, and it is worth understanding because it is the one place their model beats a per-call one outright. X charges per event delivered rather than per request you make, so you are not paying to ask whether anything happened. For a workload that watches a small set of accounts and needs low latency, that is structurally cheaper than any polling design, ours included, and we will say so rather than sell around it. We bill webhook and monitor delivery the same way we bill everything else, per call, with no separate event fee and no separate plan. Figures verified on 13 August 2026.

When you poll a small set of accounts frequently and each poll returns almost nothing new. X bills per distinct resource read and does not charge twice for the same post inside a 24 hour UTC window, so checking 50 accounts every 15 minutes costs the same as checking them hourly: about $37.50 a month for 7,500 new posts. A per-call vendor bills every request you make, so the same job at a 15 minute cadence is 144,000 calls, which is $115.20 here. The official API also wins on latency, because its webhook delivery charges $0.005 per event rather than making you poll at all. Third-party per-call pricing wins the moment a single request returns many records, which is any backfill, any search sweep, and any follower export.

On the official X API you pay per resource: $0.005 to $0.010 to read and $0.010 to $0.015 to write. TwitterAPIs returns the same public data for a flat $0.0008 a call, and each call carries roughly 20 tweets, so 1,000 tweets land at $0.04 instead of the $5 to $10 you would spend going through X directly.

None. Billing is strictly per call, with no recurring plan, no floor on monthly spend, and nothing to cancel. Every new account opens with $0.50 of credit and is charged only for the calls it actually makes.

X dropped its old fixed Basic, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions and switched everything to consumption billing in 2026. What remains is a Free tier (built for writing, capped near 100 reads a month, useless for harvesting data), reads billed from $0.005 a resource, writes from $0.010 a resource under a 3 million monthly read ceiling, and Enterprise contracts above that ceiling that X does not publish a price for. TwitterAPIs skips tiers entirely: one $0.0008 rate per call, roughly 20 tweets each, at any volume and with no monthly ceiling.

X's free tier exists to publish, not to collect. Reads are throttled to roughly 100 posts a month, the feature set targets bots that post rather than tools that pull data, and there is no real search, timeline, or follower access bundled in. To read at any meaningful scale for free, lean on the TwitterAPIs $0.50 starter credit (around 625 calls), then continue pay-as-you-go at $0.04 per 1,000 tweets with no monthly read ceiling.

Yes, and it is the line most cost models miss because you do not call these, they call you. X bills per billable event delivered through its Account Activity webhooks, deduplicated in the same 24 hour UTC window as every other resource. Inbound events cost money and your own outbound actions do not: dm.received, chat.received, follow.follow and follow.unfollow are $0.010 each; post.create, profile.update, news.new, spaces.start and spaces.end are $0.005; mute and block events are $0.001. Nothing is charged for post.delete, dm.sent, dm.read, dm.indicate_typing, chat.sent or chat.conversation_join. In practice a support inbox taking 500 direct messages a day bills about $150 a month in dm.received events alone, before a single post is read. TwitterAPIs does not sell an event stream, so there is no equivalent line here to compare against.

X credits a percentage of your X API credit purchases back as xAI API credits, on a ladder tied to cumulative spend inside the current billing cycle: 0% below $200, 10% from $200 to $499, 15% from $500 to $999, and 20% at $1,000 and above. Two conditions decide whether it is worth anything. The credits are spendable on the xAI API, not on the X API that earned them, so they are a discount only if you were already going to build on Grok. And cumulative spend resets to $0 each cycle, so a team spending $150 a month never leaves the 0% rung while a team spending $1,000 in one cycle reaches 20%. It does not change the per-resource rate you pay for data.