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

No, and the split is clean. Our closest per-call competitor sells monthly plans that grant a credit balance, and on 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, in each case only if you consume the whole credit balance before it resets. We sell one metered rate of $0.0008 per call with no plan and no expiry. Break-even is the plan fee divided by our rate, so below roughly 18,750 calls a month our metered pay-as-you-go rate is the cheapest of the two, because the smallest plan fee alone exceeds your entire bill with us. Above roughly 123,750 calls a month, if you can reliably burn the credit each cycle, their top plan is cheaper. Steady, predictable high volume favours their subscription. Bursty, seasonal, or one-off work favours metered billing, because nothing here has a floor and no credit expires.

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 the entire 2 million post read allowance for that billing cycle, so anything further that 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, though that plan grants $300 of credit and roughly two thirds of it would expire unused on a one-off job.

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 $0.04 per 1,000 tweets.

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 2 million monthly read cap you need Enterprise, which is reported to open near $42,000 a month. TwitterAPIs has no tiers at all: a single $0.0008 rate per call, about 20 tweets each, regardless of volume.

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 2 million monthly read ceiling, and Enterprise contracts above that ceiling that open around $42,000 a month. 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.