X (Twitter) API Pricing in 2026: Pay-Per-Use Costs

As of October 2026, the X (Twitter) API is pay-per-use. There is no free tier and no monthly plan for new developers: you buy credits in the X Developer Console, and each request deducts from the balance. A post read costs $0.005, a user read $0.010, and creating a post $0.015.

This guide covers the official price list, what you actually get for it, the costs that do not show up on the price page, and when a public-data API is the better fit.

How much does the X API cost in 2026?

X switched new developers to pay-per-usage pricing on 7 February 2026, replacing the fixed monthly tiers. You pay per resource returned or per action taken. These are the main rates from X's pricing page as of October 2026:

Three rules shape the real bill:

• Deduplication. The same resource requested more than once in a 24-hour UTC day is charged once.
• A monthly read cap. Pay-per-use stops at 3 million post reads per billing cycle. Past that, X points you to Enterprise.
• Prepaid balance. Credits are bought upfront. If the balance runs out, requests are blocked until you top up.

X also offers new accounts $20 of free credits, and gives back part of your spend as xAI API credits once it passes a threshold. Rates change, so treat the official pricing page as the source of truth.

Is the Twitter API free?

No. The free tier that once allowed basic posting was discontinued when pay-per-use launched, and reading has needed a paid plan since 2023. What remains free is small:

• $20 of starter credits for new developer accounts, which buys roughly 4,000 post reads at $0.005 each.
• Cheaper owned reads at $0.001 when the authenticated user is the owner of the app, for example a tool that reads only your own account.

Anything beyond that is metered.

What happened to Basic, Pro and Enterprise?

Before February 2026, X sold access in tiers. Basic was $200 a month and Pro was $5,000 a month, each with a fixed monthly read allowance. Those plans are closed to new sign-ups. X has been migrating legacy Basic subscribers to pay-per-use during 2026, so if you still have Basic or Pro, check the plan shown in your Developer Console rather than an old blog post.

Enterprise still exists for high-volume and full-firehose use. X does not publish Enterprise prices; you talk to its sales team.

What does the X API cost for real workloads?

The price list is per resource, so the bill depends on how many posts and users your job touches. Some rough sums at the October 2026 rates, before deduplication:

Replies are posts, so a monitoring job that reads every reply under a viral post pays for each one. That is the line item that surprises people most.

What do you get for the money?

The X API v2 gives you posts, users, replies (through conversation search), Lists, Spaces, Communities, likes and follows, plus write access: posting, deleting, liking, following and direct messages. It is the only official route for anything that acts on an account.

Each endpoint also has its own rate limit, counted per 15-minute window, separately per app and per user. For example, recent search allows 450 requests per 15 minutes per app, and the user lookup endpoint 300 per app. Enterprise customers get custom limits.

What are the hidden costs of the X API?

The per-resource price is not the whole story:

• No hard monthly ceiling below 3 million reads. Pay-per-use has no fixed fee, which also means no built-in budget. Set a spending limit in the Developer Console before you run a backfill.
• Pagination charges. You pay for every post returned, including the ones you filter out afterwards. Narrow queries on the server side where you can.
• Training restrictions. Since June 2025, X's developer agreement forbids using the X API or X content to fine-tune or train a foundation or frontier model, as TechCrunch reported. Read the Developer Agreement against your use case before you build.
• Price changes. X has changed its API pricing several times since 2023. Budget for the possibility that it changes again.

When is the official X API the right choice?

Use the official API when you need any of these:

• Posting, replying, liking or DMs from an account you control.
• Account management for users who authorise your app.
• Full-archive or firehose-scale access under an Enterprise agreement.
• Reading your own account's data, which is billed at the cheaper owned-read rate.

For a bot that posts a few times a day, pay-per-use is cheap. The bill grows when you read other people's posts at volume.

What is the alternative for public X data?

If your job is reading public posts, profiles and replies (monitoring, research or feeding an AI agent), a public-data API is usually simpler to budget. crawlfeed bills per call, not per post, and one call returns a whole page:

A page of an account's posts costs 1 credit, and so does a page of replies. You get the same JSON shape as for Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and the other 26 platforms, new accounts get 100 free credits, and failed calls are refunded. Pack prices are on the pricing page.

Be clear about the limits. crawlfeed is independent of X and only reads public data. It cannot post, reply, like, send DMs, read protected accounts or act for a user, and it does not offer X keyword search today. If you need any of those, the official API is the route.

For a side-by-side of when each fits, see X API alternatives, and for working code, our guide to scraping public X data.

The short answer

The X API is not free in 2026. New developers pay $0.005 per post read and $0.015 per post created from a prepaid balance, capped at 3 million reads a month. If you need to act on an account, that is the only option and it is reasonably priced for low volume. If you only need to read public posts and replies, compare it with a per-call API before you commit, and check X's pricing page for the current numbers.