Is the X (Twitter) API free? Prices, limits and approval (2026)

November 8, 2026

Short answer

No. The X API has no free tier for new developers: it is pay-per-use with prepaid credits, at $0.005 per post read and $0.010 per user read, capped at 3 million post reads a month. X adds $20 in credits after you save a card and make a first purchase, and reading your own app's data costs $0.001 per resource.

Short answer: no. X's pricing page describes one model, pay-per-use, with no subscription, no minimum spend and no free allowance X pricing. You buy credits, and each resource you read is deducted from them. There is no approval queue, which is the good news.

What reads cost on the official API

Resource	Price
Post read	$0.005
User read	$0.010
Followers or following	$0.010
Lists, Spaces, Communities, Notes	$0.005
Likes	$0.001
Post counts, recent / all (per request)	$0.005 / $0.010
Trends	$0.010
Your own data ("owned reads")	$0.001

Source: X API pricing. Writes cost extra, for example $0.015 to create a post and $0.200 for a post with a URL.

The rules that change your bill

Signup credits: X gives $20 in API credits when you save your first eligible card and complete your first purchase, and matches your first auto-recharge with credits up to $50 source. That is the closest thing to a free tier: 4,000 post reads.
Deduplication: a resource you already paid for is free to fetch again within the same UTC day. X calls this a soft guarantee.
Cap: pay-per-use stops at 3 million post reads per monthly billing cycle. Above that, X points you to Enterprise.
Spending controls: you can set a maximum spend per cycle, and requests are blocked once you reach it.
xAI rebate: if you link an xAI team, spending of $200 or more in a cycle earns xAI API credits, from 10% up to 20% at $1,000 and above source.

Getting access

Sign in at console.x.com with an X account and accept the Developer Agreement.
Complete your profile, including how you plan to use the API.
Create an app with a name, description and use case. The console issues your keys and tokens once, so store them safely X docs.
Buy credits, and set a spending limit before your first script runs.

Rate limits

Paying doesn't remove rate limits. Per 15 minutes X rate limits:

Endpoint	Per app	Per user	Results per call
Recent search	450	300	Up to 100
Full-archive search	300, and 1 a second	1 a second	Up to 500
User lookup	300	900
User timeline by ID	10,000	900

A cost formula you can reuse

Monthly cost = (new posts read per day x $0.005 + new users read per day x $0.010) x 30. Re-reading the same post on the same UTC day is free, so count unique resources, not requests.

Job	Unique reads a day	Official API a month
Track 25 accounts that post 10 times a day	250 posts	$37.50
Brand mentions, 1,000 matching posts a day	1,000 posts	$150
Refresh 2,000 profiles a week	about 285 users	about $86

Our post on X API vs scraping prices bigger jobs, such as follower exports and research datasets.

Which one fits you

You post, reply, send DMs or act for users: official API. Nothing else can.
You read your own account's mentions, bookmarks and followers: official API at $0.001 per owned read.
You need a contract with X, or more than 3 million posts a month: Enterprise.
You read public posts and profiles of other accounts and want to cut cost: price a third-party data API against the formula above.

The free open-source route

twscrape (MIT) reads search, tweets, replies, users, followers, lists, communities and trends. Its README says it requires authorized X accounts, recommends adding them by cookies, and handles rate limits by rotating accounts. It also notes that X's terms discourage using multiple accounts twscrape README. Those accounts can be suspended, and the data access depends on them. We cover X's terms and the court cases in is scraping X legal.

This is not legal advice. If your project depends on it, ask a lawyer who knows your use case and your country.

The pay-per-call option

ScrapeIO reads public X data for 1 credit per call: twitter profile API, twitter user tweets API (a page of posts with views, likes, reposts and bookmarks), twitter search API with X's search operators, and twitter replies API. You pay per call, not per post in the response.

Worked example: the 25-account tracker above is 25 timeline calls a day, about 750 credits a month, or roughly $1.41 at the Starter rate. The 2,000-profile weekly refresh is about 8,700 credits a month, roughly $16. It is read-only: it cannot post or DM.

Compare line by line on X API pricing alternative, browse the X platform page, or connect an agent through the X MCP server. New accounts get 100 free credits.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

100 free credits, no card. Credits never expire.

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