Is the Twitter (X) API free in 2026?

#Is the official X API free? What it charges instead

The official X API is pay-per-use with no free allowance: you buy credits in X's Developer Console before the first call, and each read draws them down. X's pay-per-use price list (opens in a new tab) sets $0.005 per post and $0.010 per profile or follower, so 1,000 posts cost $5.00 and 1,000 followers cost $10.00. Reads of your own account's data cost $0.001 each, and pay-per-use stops at 3M post reads a month; past that, X sells only Enterprise contracts. Writes and every other rate are in our X API pricing breakdown.

Money is half of the setup. Before its first answer, the official X API asks for a developer account opened with your X login at console.x.com, an app, an OAuth Bearer token and a credit balance, as X's getting-access steps (opens in a new tab) list.

Good to know

X's price page promises "no minimum spend". That means you owe nothing until you call the official X API. It does not make any call free: the first post you read is billed like the millionth.

#Is there a free Twitter API for reading tweets?

Yes: for reading public X data, use Sorsa API, a Twitter (X) API and scraper. Every new account gets 100 free requests that read up to 10K tweets, 20K followers or 10K profiles, with no card and no expiry.

One API key in the ApiKey header replaces the developer account, the app and the token, as the guide to a Twitter API without a developer account shows, so the first free read is three steps away.

Side by side, only Sorsa API has a free start, and its paid rates run 250x below the official X API's on tweets and 1,000x below on followers.

• Sorsa API

  Free start

  100 requests, no card, no expiry

  Tweets, per 1,000

  from $0.014

  Followers, per 1,000

  from $0.007

  What you set up

  One API key

• Official X API

  Free start

  No free tier

  Tweets, per 1,000

  $5.00

  Followers, per 1,000

  $10.00

  What you set up

  Developer account, app, OAuth token, prepaid credits

The gap comes from what each API bills for. The official X API charges for every post and every profile it returns. Sorsa API charges one request per call, whatever the call returns, and each tweet arrives with its author's full profile at no extra cost. Failed requests are never charged, so a typo in a handle doesn't eat your free balance.

Four endpoints do most of that reading, and each one runs on the free requests:

• POST /tweet-info-bulk (opens in a new tab) returns up to 100 tweets by link or ID in one call.
• GET /info-batch (opens in a new tab) returns up to 100 profiles by username or user ID.
• GET /followers (opens in a new tab) returns up to 200 followers per page, with next_cursor pointing to the next page.
• POST /search-tweets (opens in a new tab) takes any query with X's search operators, back to 2006, about 20 tweets per page.

Search spends free requests fastest, because a page holds about 20 tweets. Lookups by ID and follower lists stretch them furthest.

#How to make your first free request

Your first call takes about three minutes and four steps, and none of them asks for a card or an X account.

1. Get a key. Sign up and copy your API key from the dashboard. The 100 free requests are already on it.

2. Check your balance. Call GET /key-usage-info (opens in a new tab): it returns remaining_requests and the rest of your key's usage, and it never counts against your requests.

   curl "https://api.sorsa.io/v3/key-usage-info" \
     -H "ApiKey: YOUR_API_KEY"
   

3. Read 100 tweets in one call. Send up to 100 tweet links or IDs in tweet_links. The whole batch costs one request.

   curl -X POST "https://api.sorsa.io/v3/tweet-info-bulk" \
     -H "ApiKey: YOUR_API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"tweet_links": ["1853018467244621957"]}'
   

   {
     "tweets": [
       {
         "id": "1853018467244621957",
         "full_text": "Shipped the export script. 4 lines of Python.",
         "created_at": "2026-10-28T14:05:11Z",
         "lang": "en",
         "likes_count": 212,
         "retweet_count": 31,
         "reply_count": 18,
         "view_count": 14820,
         "user": {
           "id": "1592041833471827968",
           "username": "kai_builds_tools",
           "display_name": "Kai Builds",
           "followers_count": 1840
         }
       }
     ]
   }
   

   Show full response

4. Run it from code. Pass a list of IDs of any length; the function sends them 100 at a time, one request per 100 tweets.

   import requests
   
   URL = "https://api.sorsa.io/v3/tweet-info-bulk"
   HEADERS = {"ApiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY"}
   
   
   def read_tweets(ids):
       """Fetch tweets by link or ID, 100 per request."""
       tweets = []
       for i in range(0, len(ids), 100):
           r = requests.post(URL, headers=HEADERS,
                             json={"tweet_links": ids[i:i + 100]})
           r.raise_for_status()
           tweets += r.json()["tweets"]
       return tweets
   

   const URL = "https://api.sorsa.io/v3/tweet-info-bulk";
   const headers = {
     ApiKey: "YOUR_API_KEY",
     "Content-Type": "application/json",
   };
   
   async function readTweets(ids) {
     const tweets = [];
     for (let i = 0; i < ids.length; i += 100) {
       const res = await fetch(URL, {
         method: "POST",
         headers,
         body: JSON.stringify({ tweet_links: ids.slice(i, i + 100) }),
       });
       if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`HTTP ${res.status}`);
       tweets.push(...(await res.json()).tweets);
     }
     return tweets;
   }
   

A 401 or 403 answer means the key is wrong, missing or out of requests; a 429 means more than 20 requests in one second, so wait a second and send it again.

#What happened to the free Twitter API

The free Twitter API didn't end in one day: X took it apart in steps from 2023 to 2026, and on February 6, 2026 it closed the last free tier to new developers.

First, reading stopped being free. In February 2023 X announced the end of free access to its v1.1 and v2 APIs, and what kept the name Free was a posting tier. Over the next three years that tier shrank, until X launched pay-per-use (opens in a new tab) as the default and moved its recently active users onto it. Six days later an X staff member answered on the forum (opens in a new tab) that the Free, Basic and Pro packages "have been deprecated". The paid plans followed: Basic subscribers moved to pay-per-use after June 1, 2026, and Pro subscribers after September 1, 2026.

What the Free tier allowed before it closed

From 2023 the Free tier was built for posting, not for reading, and its limits only got tighter, as X's own posts show.

• 2023

  Free tier allowed

  Posting only: up to 1,500 posts a month per app, plus the endpoint that identifies your own account

• November 2024

  Free tier allowed

  17 posts per 24 hours, counted per app and per user, as X staff confirmed (opens in a new tab)

• August 22, 2025

  Free tier allowed

  No more liking or following: X removed both endpoints (opens in a new tab) to fight fake engagement

• February 6, 2026

  Free tier allowed

  Closed to new developers; recently active users moved to pay-per-use

A guide that still promises 1,500 free posts a month describes a plan nobody can pick today. How X arrived at these prices is a story of its own: why the X API is so expensive.

#Who still gets free X API access

Only apps that X approves as Public Utility Apps kept free scaled access when pay-per-use launched; everyone else pays per read, from startups and agencies to students and hobby projects.

X's documentation calls Public Utility (opens in a new tab) a credit program for public-good work on the official X API, and the way in is narrow. The app first goes live on X's Developer Exhibit, which X reviews; the request is then made from that listing, and the X Dev Platform team decides. Nobody can mark their own app as a utility, and the program is no shortcut past review.

Research has no free tier of its own either: X's developer guidelines (opens in a new tab) mention separate terms for academic and EU Digital Services Act research, with no self-serve free access. University projects that need X data at scale can request Sorsa API's academic research access from an institutional email, tailored to each study, from a grant of requests at the volume it needs to a deep discount.

#Are scraping tools a free alternative?

Open-source scraping tools cost nothing to install, but most of them read X through a logged-in X account, and that account carries the risk.

Such a tool sends its requests with an account's session cookies, so X sees that account doing the scraping and can suspend it for good. Even before that, the scripts break each time X changes its pages, so repair time becomes the real bill.

Sorsa API reaches the same public data with one API key and no X login or cookies, so no X account of yours is ever at risk, and when X changes its pages, we fix it on our side.

For a few lookups without code, the free Twitter tools check accounts and export recent followers in the browser.

#Read X data free today

The official X API won't give you a free read in 2026. Sorsa API will: 100 free requests, up to 10K tweets or 20K followers, at 20 requests per second, with no card and no expiry. When they run out, tweets cost from $0.014 per 1,000, and a plan starts at $4.90 per 1,000 requests.

#FAQ