X (Twitter) API Pricing 2026: Rates, Tiers & Real Costs

By Sorsa Editorial

Published March 23, 2026. Updated September 23, 2026: the new 3 million monthly post-read cap and the legacy Pro migration added, along with Enterprise pricing, per-call costs, and pricing history, with every rate re-checked against X's official pricing page. Official X API pay-per-use rates verified September 2026.

The X API, still widely called the Twitter API, no longer sells subscription plans to new developers. You prepay credits in the X Developer Console and every call draws them down: reads are billed for each object returned, writes for each request, and webhook events for each delivery. One search that returns 100 posts is 100 billable reads, which is why the same API can cost $5 a month for a small publishing bot and several thousand dollars for a monitoring pipeline.

This guide lists the official rates as of September 23, 2026, turns them into monthly bills for real projects, explains what happened to the Free, Basic, Pro, and Enterprise tiers, and shows how much less the same data costs on a flat-rate API. If your project mostly reads X data, Sorsa API returns public tweets and profiles from $0.02 per 1,000 tweets, with author profiles included. To see your own number, the free X API cost calculator compares official pay-per-use with Sorsa's flat per-request plans at your volume.

Contents

• X API pricing tiers and rates at a glance
• How X API pay-per-use pricing works
• The X API rate card
• What common X API calls actually cost
• How much does the X API cost per 1,000 tweets?
• What the X API costs per month
• How much does it cost to post tweets with the X API?
• What happened to the Free, Basic, and Pro tiers?
• How much does X (Twitter) API Enterprise cost?
• Is the X (Twitter) API free in 2026?
• Official X API or a third-party API like Sorsa: which costs less?
• Seven billing details most X API pricing guides miss
• How to lower your X API costs
• Twitter API pricing history, 2017 to 2026
• FAQ
• Getting started

X API pricing tiers and rates at a glance

As of September 23, 2026, pay-per-use is the only self-serve way to buy X API access. The older tiers still appear in search results and in many guides, so here is where each one actually stands:

The pay-per-use rates that decide most bills:

In per-thousand terms, that is $5 per 1,000 posts read, $10 per 1,000 profiles, $15 per 1,000 posts published, and $200 per 1,000 link posts.

How X API pay-per-use pricing works

X API pay-per-use pricing is a prepaid credit system. You buy credits in the Developer Console at console.x.com, and each successful call deducts its cost in real time. There is no monthly fee and no minimum spend, and when the balance reaches zero, requests are blocked until you top up. If you have not set up access yet, the step-by-step guide to getting an X API key walks through the console.

Three billing units run side by side:

• Reads are billed per resource. Every post, profile, follower, or list in a response is a separate charge. A recent search page with 100 posts costs 100 x $0.005 = $0.50.
• Writes are billed per request. Publishing a post costs $0.015 whatever its length, or $0.20 if it contains a URL.
• Webhook events are billed per delivery. Each billable event X pushes to your endpoint through the Activity API is its own charge, even when your code ignores it.

Four account mechanics sit around those rates:

• 24-hour deduplication. Requesting the same resource more than once within a UTC day is charged once. The window resets at midnight UTC, so re-reading yesterday's posts today is billed again.
• Spending limit. You can set a maximum spend per billing cycle, the simplest guard against a runaway loop.
• Auto-recharge. Credits can top up automatically, but at most once per 5-minute window, and auto-recharge pauses when the balance hits zero or goes negative. Bursty jobs can still run dry.
• xAI credit rebate. Cumulative X API spend in a billing cycle earns credits for xAI's Grok API: 10% from $200, 15% from $500, and 20% from $1,000. The rebate arrives as xAI credits, not X API credits, so it only lowers your costs if you also build on Grok.

The billing unit is the whole story. Read-heavy work such as search, monitoring, follower analysis, and dataset building scales with the number of objects you pull, not with the number of calls you make.

The X API rate card

The tables below cover the pay-per-use rates X publishes as of September 23, 2026. X's official pricing page is the source of truth, and the Developer Console always shows the current rates.

Read operations (billed per resource returned)

Owned Reads apply only when your app requests data for the account that owns the developer app, and only on these 12 endpoints: GET /2/users/{id}/tweets, /mentions, /liked_tweets, /bookmarks, /followers, /following, /blocking, /muting, /owned_lists, /followed_lists, /list_memberships, and /pinned_lists. Point the same endpoints at another account and the standard rates apply: $0.005 per post and $0.010 per follower.

Writes and other per-request operations

The follow, like, and quote-post endpoints are missing on purpose: X removed them from all self-serve plans on April 20, 2026, and has not published which Enterprise contracts include them.

Webhook events (billed per event delivered)

Webhook charges attach to traffic you receive rather than calls you make, so a busy account's DM and follow events keep billing around the clock.

What common X API calls actually cost

Per-resource rates are hard to budget with, so this table translates them into the calls developers make most often, using the page sizes X documents:

Recent search is open to every developer, and full-archive search is available on pay-per-use as well as Enterprise, according to X's search documentation. The pricing page lists no separate rate for streaming, so budget posts from the filtered stream like any other post read; on pay-per-use, the filtered stream allows 1,000 rules and one connection per project. For walkthroughs of each call, see the guides to searching tweets via API, historical Twitter data, and getting followers via API.

How much does the X API cost per 1,000 tweets?

Reading 1,000 tweets on the official X API costs $5.00 at $0.005 per post. If your pipeline also fetches the author profile behind each tweet as a user read, add $10.00, for $15.00 per 1,000 tweets with author data.

Author data is the line item that most often breaks a budget. X's pricing page does not say whether user objects returned through expansions are billed as user reads, so run a small test and check the usage view in the Developer Console before you commit to a number. Flat-rate APIs remove the line item entirely: every Sorsa tweet response carries the full author profile at no extra charge, so 1,000 complete tweets cost from $0.02 on batch endpoints instead of $15.00.

Per 1,000 is also the fairest unit for comparing providers, because each one slices billing differently. The comparison with third-party APIs follows further down.

What the X API costs per month

Because reads are billed per object, cost grows in a straight line with volume until you reach the 3 million cap:

User and follower reads cost twice as much per object: 100,000 profiles come to $1,000.

What real projects cost at official rates

Publishing to your own account. Ten plain posts a day (300 a month) cost $4.50, and hourly checks on the metrics of your latest 20 posts add about $0.60, thanks to Owned Reads at $0.001 and same-day deduplication. Total: about $5 a month. At this scale the official API is cheap and the right tool.

An agency scheduler posting links. 1,500 posts a month across client accounts cost $22.50 without links and $300 when every post carries a URL. The $0.20 link rate is more than 13 times the plain rate, and no other price changes publishing economics as much.

A brand monitor. 10,000 mentions a month cost $50 in post reads. Pull the author profile behind each mention to judge reach, and the bill becomes $150.

A competitor follower audit. Downloading the full follower lists of five competitors with 50,000 followers each is 250,000 follower reads: $2,500 every time you refresh them.

An AI agent that reads X. An agent running 200 searches a day at 20 posts each reads 120,000 posts a month: $600. Agents and MCP servers that call the X API are billed exactly like any other app, so repeated searches on the same topic add up fast without caching. The guide to the Twitter API for AI agents and the Sorsa MCP server cover the setup side.

A research dataset. Collecting 500,000 posts through full-archive search costs $2,500, or $7,500 with author profiles, and uses a sixth of the monthly cap.

A 24/7 keyword monitor. Polling one busy query every minute at about 40 new posts a minute reads roughly 1.73 million posts a month: $8,640. Two pipelines like this exceed the 3 million cap, which leaves an Enterprise contract or a third-party API as the only ways to scale.

Five of these seven projects are pure reads, and each of them fits inside a flat Sorsa plan for a fraction of the official bill, as the side-by-side comparison further down shows.

How much does it cost to post tweets with the X API?

Posting through the X API costs $0.015 per post in 2026, or $0.20 if the post contains a URL. There is no free posting allowance anymore: the old Free tier's 500 posts a month ended with the move to pay-per-use.

The other write costs are smaller: a DM is $0.015, deleting an interaction is $0.010, and replies that X classifies as summoned (for example, a bot answering a post that tags it) are $0.010, even when they include a URL. X removed the follow, like, and quote-post endpoints from all self-serve plans on April 20, 2026, so pay-per-use apps can no longer automate follows, likes, or quote posts.

Money is only one limit. X also caps how many posts an account and an app can publish, and the guide to X posting limits breaks those caps down.

What happened to the Free, Basic, and Pro tiers?

The fixed Free, Basic, and Pro tiers are closed to new developers in 2026, and X is moving the remaining subscribers onto pay-per-use:

• Free ended when pay-per-use launched in February 2026. Recently active Free apps received a one-time $10 voucher on migration, enough for about 2,000 post reads. X says only for-good public-utility apps keep free access, granted case by case.
• Basic ($200 a month) was marked for deprecation on May 21, 2026. After June 1, 2026, all Basic subscribers, monthly and annual, were moved to pay-per-use automatically, with prorated credits for annual plans.
• Pro ($5,000 a month) followed on August 14, 2026, when X announced that Pro is moving to pay-per-use as well. After September 1, 2026, each remaining Pro subscription ends at its own cutover date and switches to pay-per-use.
• Enterprise continues as a negotiated contract and is now the only route past the pay-per-use read cap.

The last published allowances make the old and new models easy to compare:

In dollars, the switch cuts both ways. Basic's 15,000 post reads now cost $75, well under its $200 fee, and Pro's 1 million reads cost $5,000, the same as the old subscription. Heavy posters lose the most: Basic's 50,000 posts per app now cost $750 as plain posts or $10,000 with links, and a team that used all of Pro (1 million reads plus 300,000 posts) would pay $9,500 at current rates.

How much does X (Twitter) API Enterprise cost?

X does not publish Enterprise prices. The most cited figures date from 2023, when Wired reported Enterprise packages starting at $42,000 a month for 50 million tweets and rising to $125,000 for 100 million and $210,000 for 200 million (summarized by Nieman Lab). Contracts are negotiated case by case, so treat those numbers as a reference point, not a quote.

What Enterprise adds over pay-per-use:

• Volume above 3 million post reads a month, the pay-per-use ceiling.
• Larger streaming limits: 25,000 or more filtered-stream rules and multiple connections, against 1,000 rules and one connection on pay-per-use, plus Enterprise-only semantic operators.
• Custom terms negotiated directly with X's sales team.

Access starts with X's Enterprise access form, which asks for your company, use case, and expected data volume. Approval is selective, and the contracts are sized for companies with compliance or large streaming needs. If what you need is read volume, price it on a flat-rate API first: 3 million posts a month is about 150,000 search requests on Sorsa, well inside its $899 plan with 500,000 requests.

Is the X (Twitter) API free in 2026?

No. The X API has no free tier for new developers in 2026: every request draws on prepaid credits, and an account with a zero balance cannot make calls. The only exceptions are the one-time $10 migration voucher for legacy Free apps and the free access X grants to approved public-utility apps.

Free ways to work with X data still exist, just not from X. The fastest is Sorsa: the browser playground runs live endpoints with no signup, and every new account gets 100 free requests, enough for up to 10,000 tweets through batch endpoints, with no credit card. The breakdown of whether the Twitter API is free walks through every other option.

Official X API or a third-party API like Sorsa: which costs less?

Once you read more than about 10,000 posts a month, a flat-rate third-party API costs far less than official pay-per-use, because one request returns many posts for a single charge instead of billing each post. The official API remains the right tool for writes and for very small read volumes.

Stay on the official API for:

• Writes. Posting, DMs, and every other action that changes data on X require the first-party API.
• Official-only products, such as the Ads API, compliance streams, and Enterprise data agreements.
• Very small read volume, where a few thousand post reads cost a few dollars.

Third-party APIs win on read-heavy work: search, mention tracking, competitor monitoring, follower analysis, sentiment pipelines, AI agents, and dataset building. Here is what the per-1,000 price looks like across the market for tweet data:

Third-party rates from each provider's public pricing page, checked September 23, 2026.

Sorsa is a read-only REST API for public X data, built for exactly that read-heavy case. It bills one flat unit per request, returns up to 100 tweets or profiles per batch request and up to 200 accounts per follower page, and includes the full author profile in every tweet response at no extra charge. That works out to from $0.02 per 1,000 tweets on batch endpoints and about $0.10 per 1,000 on search, where even the search rate is 50x below official post reads. You sign up and call every endpoint with a single API key, without an X developer account. Every plan gets the same 20 requests per second, with no URL-post premium, no webhook meter, and no per-post read cap beyond your plan's request quota. The pricing page shows how the per-1,000 rate falls as plans grow:

The same read-heavy projects from earlier, priced both ways:

Sorsa is read-only, so posting and DMs stay on the official API, and the usual setup is a split: writes on the official API, reads on a flat-rate plan. The comparison of Twitter API alternatives covers the wider field, and the migration guide maps official endpoints to their Sorsa equivalents. The decision compresses to four lines:

• Posting, DMs, or other writes: the official X API.
• Testing, or a few thousand post reads a month: Sorsa's 100 free requests or official pay-per-use.
• Read-heavy production workloads: a flat per-request API such as Sorsa.
• Above 3 million post reads a month under official terms: an X Enterprise contract.

Seven billing details most X API pricing guides miss

1. The cap is 3 million, not 2 million. X's pricing page now caps pay-per-use at 3 million post reads per billing cycle, while many guides still quote the 2 million figure from earlier in 2026. The cap counts post reads specifically, and X points anyone who needs more to Enterprise, so plan for post reads to stop at the cap.
2. Batching saves requests, not money, on the official API. GET /2/tweets accepts up to 100 IDs per call, but you still pay $0.005 for every post returned. Batching helps with rate limits; on Sorsa, where one batch request returns up to 100 tweets for a single unit, it cuts cost roughly 100x.
3. Author profiles can triple a read bill. A pipeline that fetches the profile behind every post pays $0.010 per profile on top of $0.005 per post, and X does not document how expanded user objects are billed.
4. Deduplication resets at midnight UTC. Same-day repeats are free; the same posts polled again tomorrow are billed again. Use since_id or start_time so each run fetches only new posts.
5. Webhooks bill on inbound traffic. A popular account's follow.follow and dm.received events cost $0.010 each whether or not your app uses them.
6. Paying more does not buy throughput. Every endpoint keeps its own rate limits regardless of your balance, which is why teams that budgeted only for cost still hit HTTP 429 errors. The X API rate limits guide maps them endpoint by endpoint.
7. A zero balance is a hard stop. Auto-recharge fires at most once per 5 minutes and pauses at a zero or negative balance, so production jobs need an alert on the balance, not just a card on file.

How to lower your X API costs

These tactics cut spend on any provider, official or third-party, and the Sorsa docs on optimizing API usage show the batching and caching patterns in code.

• Count before you pull. A post counts request costs $0.005 (recent) or $0.010 (full archive) and tells you how many posts match a query before you spend $5 per 1,000 downloading them.
• Fetch only what is new. Store the newest post ID per query and pass it as since_id, so each poll pays only for posts you have not seen.
• Cache aggressively. Keep post data for 6 to 12 hours and profiles for 24 hours; profiles change rarely, and every avoided lookup saves $0.010.
• Read your own account through Owned Reads. Timelines, mentions, bookmarks, and followers of your own authenticated user cost $0.001 per resource instead of $0.005 or $0.010.
• Keep links out of high-volume posting. A URL multiplies the cost of a post by more than 13, so reserve links for the posts that need them.
• Audit webhook subscriptions. Subscribe only to the events your app consumes, and drop high-volume events on large accounts unless they drive a feature.
• Set a spending limit per billing cycle during development, so a loop bug costs dollars instead of thousands.
• Split reads from writes. Keep writes on the official API and move read-heavy jobs to a flat-rate API such as Sorsa; for mixed workloads, the hybrid setup usually costs far less than running everything on the official API.

Twitter API pricing history, 2017 to 2026

The current rate card is the latest step in a long climb. The explainer on why the Twitter API became so expensive covers the reasons; this timeline covers the prices:

FAQ

How much does the X API cost in 2026?

The X API costs $0.005 per post read, $0.010 per user profile, $0.015 per post published, and $0.20 per post with a URL on pay-per-use, the only self-serve option in 2026. You prepay credits, pay no monthly fee, and can read up to 3 million posts per billing cycle. Reading 100,000 posts a month costs about $500.

Is there a free X (Twitter) API in 2026?

No. X ended its free tier when pay-per-use launched in February 2026, and new developers must buy credits before making any call. Legacy Free apps received a one-time $10 voucher, and X grants free access only to approved public-utility apps. Third-party providers fill the gap: Sorsa, for example, gives every new account 100 free requests, enough for up to 10,000 tweets, with no credit card.

How much does the X API cost per 1,000 tweets?

Reading 1,000 tweets costs $5.00 on the official X API at $0.005 per post. Fetching the 1,000 author profiles as user reads adds $10.00, for $15.00 in total. Flat-rate APIs price the same data far lower: Sorsa starts from $0.02 per 1,000 tweets on batch endpoints, with author profiles included.

What is the cheapest way to get X (Twitter) data in 2026?

For read-only work, a flat-rate third-party API is the cheapest route. Sorsa, for example, costs from $0.02 per 1,000 tweets on batch endpoints and about $0.10 per 1,000 on search, author profiles included, against $5.00 per 1,000 post reads on the official X API. The official API stays necessary for posting and DMs.

What is the X API monthly post read cap?

Pay-per-use accounts are capped at 3 million post reads per monthly billing cycle, according to X's pricing documentation in September 2026. Many older guides still cite 2 million. X points accounts that need more volume to an Enterprise plan, so plan for post reads to stop once you reach the cap.

Can you still buy the $200 Basic or $5,000 Pro plan?

No. Both legacy plans are closed to new developers. X moved all Basic subscribers to pay-per-use after June 1, 2026, and announced on August 14, 2026 that Pro subscriptions end at each account's cutover date after September 1, 2026. New accounts choose between pay-per-use and Enterprise.

How much does X API Enterprise cost?

X does not publish Enterprise pricing. In 2023, Wired reported Enterprise packages starting at $42,000 a month for 50 million tweets, and that figure remains the most cited reference point. Enterprise is the only route above the pay-per-use cap of 3 million post reads a month.

How much does it cost to post a tweet with the X API?

Publishing a post through the X API costs $0.015, or $0.20 if the post contains a URL. Replies that X classifies as summoned cost $0.010. There is no free posting allowance in 2026, so 1,000 plain posts cost $15 and 1,000 posts with links cost $200.

Does X Premium include API access?

No. X Premium is a subscription for your X account, while the X API is billed separately through prepaid credits in the Developer Console. X's API pricing documentation lists no Premium discount or bundled API credits, so a Premium subscriber pays the same pay-per-use rates as everyone else.

What was the Twitter Premium API, and what did it cost?

The Twitter Premium API was a paid v1.1 product for search and account activity, launched in 2017 and 2018. Premium 30-day search started at $149 a month and full-archive search at $99 a month, with top tiers at $2,499 and $1,899. X deprecated the Premium v1.1 APIs in April 2023, and the same data is now billed through pay-per-use.

Are X API webhooks billed separately?

Yes. Events delivered through the X Activity API are billed per event: $0.010 for dm.received, chat.received, and follow events, $0.005 for post.create and profile updates, and $0.001 for mute and block events. Events such as post.delete, dm.sent, dm.read, and chat.sent are not billed.

Getting started

If official pricing makes your search, monitoring, or analytics workload expensive, price it before rebuilding anything: the cost calculator compares official pay-per-use with Sorsa at your volume in about a minute. Try the exact endpoints you need in the browser playground with no signup, then run a real proof of concept on the 100 free requests every new Sorsa account gets: no credit card, they never expire, and they stretch to 10,000 tweets or 20,000 profiles. Plans start from $0.02 per 1,000 tweets on batch endpoints, every tier gets the same 20 requests per second, and the quickstart gets you from API key to live data in a few minutes. Keep the official API for the writes that need it.

Reviewed by Keksich, founder of Sorsa, marketer and X API researcher.

This guide draws on our team's hands-on work running the live Sorsa API since 2022 and re-costing our own pipelines every time X changes its rates. The official rates, the 3 million post-read cap, and the Owned Reads rules were read from X's pay-per-use pricing documentation, the search and filtered-stream limits from X's API documentation, and the plan changes from X's developer announcements for the pay-per-use launch, the April 20 rate changes, and the Basic and Pro deprecations. Historical prices come from contemporary reporting by TechCrunch and Nieman Lab, and third-party rates from each provider's public pricing page, checked the same day. More on our team is on the about page. Verified September 2026.