The X (Twitter) API in 2026: Pricing, Rate Limits & What Still Works

The X (Twitter) API no longer has a free tier for new developers, and the old subscription tiers — Basic at $200/month, Pro at $5,000/month — are closed to new signups. As of February 6, 2026, X moved everyone to pay-per-usage: you buy credits and each request deducts a few tenths of a cent. There are no monthly minimums, but there's also no free lunch, and the pricing has changed twice in 2026 alone.

This is the honest field guide to the X API in 2026. By the end you'll know exactly what pay-per-usage costs in practice, why the legacy tiers still matter (existing subscribers are grandfathered in), the real rate limits, how to get an API key under the Project → App model, what v2 still can't do without v1.1, and the realistic alternatives now that Nitter is dead and the free tier is gone.

This article is a technical overview, not legal advice. Platform terms and data-protection laws vary by jurisdiction — consult qualified counsel before building on public data.

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Did X Kill the Twitter API? What Changed Since 2023

X didn't kill the API — it monetized it, in two waves. If you learned the Twitter API before 2023, almost everything you know about access and pricing is now wrong. Here's the timeline that matters:

• February 2023: Twitter announced the end of free API access for both v2 and v1.1, effective February 9. The free Essential and Elevated tiers — which had allowed hundreds of thousands to millions of tweets per month at no cost — were discontinued and replaced by a paid Basic tier.

  Source: techpolicy.press — Twitter API changes set to disrupt research

• Mid-2023: The Academic Research track was removed from all accounts, halting 100+ active research projects. There is still no dedicated academic tier in 2026 — researchers were pushed onto paid Pro or off the platform entirely.

  Source: Columbia Journalism Review — What happened to academic research on Twitter

• February 6, 2026: X replaced the flat-tier model with pay-per-usage (credit-based) pricing as the default for all new developers. Basic and Pro are now legacy-only — available to existing subscribers, closed to new signups.

  Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

The throughline: X treats its data as a metered, paid asset, and it reprices aggressively. That's the lens to read every number below through — they're current as of mid-2026, and X has a documented habit of changing them.

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How Much Does the X (Twitter) API Cost in 2026?

There are two pricing worlds in 2026: pay-per-usage (what new developers get) and the legacy tiers (grandfathered for existing subscribers). New projects can only use pay-per-usage.

Pay-per-usage (the 2026 default)

X's own docs describe it plainly: "The X API uses pay-per-usage pricing with no subscriptions. Buy credits, set spending limits, and earn up to 20% back in free xAI API credits."

Source: docs.x.com — X API pricing

Per-request prices, as broken down by independent provider analyses (X's own per-call rate card isn't published on a single public page), look roughly like this:

Action	Approx. cost per request
Read your own posts / followers / lists	~$0.001
Read a third-party post	~$0.005
Read user / following / trends data	~$0.010
Create a text or media post (no URL)	~$0.015
Create a post containing a URL	~$0.20
Send DM / block / mute	~$0.015

Source: blotato.com — Twitter API pricing

The read ceiling on pay-per-usage is 2,000,000 posts per month. What that means in practice:

• A side project posting 100 link-free tweets and reading 1,000 posts a month runs a few dollars.
• Scale to 10,000 link-free posts a month and you're around $150.
• Posts with URLs at ~$0.20 each get expensive fast — that single line item jumped roughly 1,900% in an April 2026 repricing.

Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

Legacy tiers (existing subscribers only)

If you signed up before February 2026, these still apply — and they're the reason "the Twitter API costs $200 a month to read anything" became a meme:

Tier	Price	Reads/month	Posts/month	Key features
Basic	$200/mo	~10,000–15,000	~50,000 (app), 3,000/user	Recent search only (7-day window)
Pro	$5,000/mo	~1,000,000	~300,000	Full-archive search + filtered stream
Enterprise	$42,000+/mo	50,000,000+	Custom	Sales-led, custom terms

Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

Note that Basic launched at $100/month in 2023 and was later repriced to $200 — older guides still cite the $100 figure. The other pain point is the cliff: there is no middle option between Basic and Pro. If you outgrow Basic's 7-day search window, the next step up is a $5,000/month jump.

Source: xpoz.ai — Twitter API pricing tiers and alternatives

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Is There a Free X (Twitter) API Tier?

No — not for new developers. The free tier was discontinued, and new signups are routed to pay-per-usage with no free option. X grants free access only to "for-good public utility apps" on a case-by-case basis.

Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

For historical reference, the old free tier was write-oriented and nearly useless for reading: roughly 1,500 posts/month of write capacity, about 50 reads per 24 hours, 1 App ID, and no search. That's the constraint that drove researchers and indie developers off the platform — you could post, but you couldn't meaningfully read.

Source: devcommunity.x.com — Read limit for the free tier

So if your goal is reading tweets — pulling a user's timeline, searching a topic, analyzing engagement — there is no free path through the official API in 2026. You're either paying per request or looking at an alternative.

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What Are the X (Twitter) API Rate Limits?

Rate limits depend on which pricing world you're in. On pay-per-usage, the practical ceiling is the 2,000,000 reads/month cap plus your own spending limit — you pace yourself with credits, not a fixed QPS. Exceeding a window returns the standard 429 Too Many Requests.

Source: blotato.com — Twitter API pricing

On the legacy tiers, limits are per-endpoint and per-window:

Capability	Basic	Pro
Recent search (last 7 days)	60 requests / 15 min	300 requests / 15 min
Full-archive search	Not available	300 requests / 15 min
Monthly read cap	~10,000	~1,000,000
Filtered stream	Not available	Up to 50 concurrent connections

Source: xpoz.ai — Twitter API pricing tiers

Two structural details trip people up:

• Reads are tracked at the project level; writes have app-level and per-user sub-caps. On legacy Basic, for example, the 50,000 posts/month app-level cap still limits any single user to ~3,000/month. Hitting the app cap doesn't mean a single user was heavy — it's the sum across all your users.
• The 7-day search window on Basic is a hard wall. Recent search returns nothing older than seven days. Full-archive search (back to March 2006) is Pro and Enterprise only.

Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

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How to Get an X (Twitter) API Key

To get an X API key, sign in to the developer console at console.x.com, create a Project, then create an App inside it. Your credentials are issued per app. The resource model is always Project → App → keys.

X supports three authentication methods, and choosing the right one is the most common setup mistake:

Auth method	Use it for	Notes
OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token (App-Only)	Read-only, server-to-server access to public data	Cannot act as a user — no posting, no DMs
OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code + PKCE (User Context)	Acting on behalf of a user (posting, reading private data)	Requires user consent flow
OAuth 1.0a User Context	Legacy user-context actions, some v1.1 endpoints	Still supported, mostly for media upload

Source: docs.x.com — Application-only authentication

For most read-heavy use cases — pulling public tweets and profiles — the App-Only Bearer Token is what you want. Here's a minimal read using Tweepy and a bearer token:

import tweepy

# App-Only Bearer Token — read-only access to public data
client = tweepy.Client(bearer_token="YOUR_BEARER_TOKEN")

# Look up a user, then their recent tweets (v2)
user = client.get_user(username="elonmusk")
tweets = client.get_users_tweets(
    user.data.id,
    max_results=10,
    tweet_fields=["public_metrics", "created_at"],
)

for tweet in tweets.data:
    metrics = tweet.public_metrics
    print(f"{metrics['like_count']:>8} likes  ·  {tweet.text[:80]}")

Install it with pip install tweepy. Remember that under pay-per-usage, each of those reads deducts credits — get_user and get_users_tweets are billed per request, so cache aggressively in production.

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Twitter API v2 vs v1.1: Which Do You Need?

API v2 is the standard and the only one that receives new features. It uses pay-per-usage, modern JSON with fields and expansions, conversation tracking, edit history, and annotations. Build new integrations on v2.

Source: docs.x.com — About the X API

v1.1 is legacy and mostly Enterprise-gated, with one stubborn exception: media upload. For a long time the v1.1 media upload endpoint was the only way to attach images or video to a post, because no v2 equivalent existed. As one developer put it, "the media upload v1.1 endpoint is the only one that hasn't been deprecated since it does not yet exist in v2."

Source: devcommunity.x.com — Posting media on v1.1

That gap is closing — a v2 media upload endpoint (api.x.com/2/media/upload) is rolling out. But if you're posting media today and hitting errors, the v1.1 upload path is still the likely answer. Everything else should be v2.

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What Can and Can't You Do at Each Tier in 2026

The honest capability map, because the tier names don't tell you what's actually locked:

• Recent search (last 7 days): Available on legacy Basic and up, and on pay-per-usage. Basic is capped to the 7-day window.
• Full-archive search (back to 2006): Pro and Enterprise only. There is no way to query historical tweets on Basic or a light pay-per-usage budget.
• Filtered and sampled stream: Pro and Enterprise only. Real-time firehose-style access is not available at the entry level.
• Academic access: Discontinued. No dedicated track exists; research-scale access means paying Pro prices.

Source: postproxy.dev — X API pricing 2026

The realistic ceiling for a small developer in 2026: pay-per-usage works fine for light publishing and reading your own data, but the moment you need historical search or streaming, you're looking at $5,000/month. That cliff is why most independent developers and small teams now look elsewhere.

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X (Twitter) API Alternatives: Scraping, Nitter, and Unified APIs

When pay-per-usage gets expensive or you need historical depth without Pro, you have three realistic options — and one of them is already off the table.

Scraping Twitter directly is explicitly prohibited by X's Terms of Service, and X has litigated aggressively against scrapers and researchers. Public-data scraping sits in the same contested legal gray zone as other platforms (the hiQ v. LinkedIn debates), but on X it's a clear ToS violation regardless. For the full legal picture, see the social media scraping legal and technical guide.

Nitter is dead. The privacy-friendly front-end that many tools quietly relied on broke in early 2024 when X disabled guest-account creation; the founder declared it dead, and remaining instances are broken or rate-limited. If a 2023-era tutorial tells you to route through Nitter, it no longer works.

Source: r/privacy — Nitter is dead

Unified and third-party data APIs are where most developers landed. They wrap X access (under their own terms and infrastructure), are credit-based, and are typically far cheaper than official Pro. Here's how the options compare:

	Official X API	Scraping / Nitter	Unified social API (e.g., SocialCrawl)
Free tier	No (new devs)	N/A	Credit-based, no $200 floor
Read tweets / profiles	Yes (paid)	Fragile / broken	Yes
Search	7-day (Basic), full-archive (Pro $5k)	N/A	Yes (recent + AI search)
Multi-platform	X only	X only	42 platforms, one schema
Auth overhead	OAuth + Project/App model	None	One API key
ToS position	Compliant	Prohibited	Public data, under provider terms
Maintenance	Yours	Yours (breaks often)	Handled server-side
Production-ready	Yes (at a price)	No	Yes

Decision logic:

Use the official X API when you need to post as a user, need real-time streaming, or compliance through X's own program is a hard requirement and the budget supports it.

Use a unified social data API when you need to read tweets, profiles, and search results without the $200 floor or the $5,000 search cliff — especially if you also need data from other platforms and want one auth model instead of a portfolio of integrations.

SocialCrawl covers X through a single x-api-key: user profiles (/v1/twitter/profile), recent tweets (/v1/twitter/user/tweets), individual tweet lookup (/v1/twitter/tweet), keyword search (/v1/twitter/ai-search), plus community and tweet-transcript endpoints. Same envelope, same credit system, same unified schema as the other 41 platforms.

import os
import requests

API_KEY = os.environ["SOCIALCRAWL_API_KEY"]
BASE_URL = "https://www.socialcrawl.dev"
HEADERS = {"x-api-key": API_KEY}

# X profile — one key, one schema
profile = requests.get(
    f"{BASE_URL}/v1/twitter/profile",
    headers=HEADERS,
    params={"handle": "elonmusk"},
).json()
print(f"{profile['data']['followers_count']:,} followers")

# Same key, same envelope — search X by keyword
results = requests.get(
    f"{BASE_URL}/v1/twitter/ai-search",
    headers=HEADERS,
    params={"query": "open source LLM"},
).json()
print(f"{len(results['data'])} matching tweets")

Honest limitation: a unified API isn't a bypass of X's rules — it covers publicly available X data under its own terms and legal parameters. The advantage is the unified access layer and the maintenance it removes, not a different legal position. For the broader landscape, see the best social media scraping APIs in 2026.

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Where to Go From Here

If you're building on the official API, start at console.x.com, create a Project and App, generate an App-Only Bearer Token for read access, and set a hard spending limit before your first request — pay-per-usage means a runaway loop costs real money.

If you want to read X data without the $200 floor, query profiles, tweets, and search live in the Explorer before writing integration code.

For how X compares to the rest of the social landscape — Reddit's $0.24/1K contract model, LinkedIn's three-scope lockdown, YouTube's quota ceiling, Instagram, and TikTok — see the 2026 guide to social media APIs.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is the X (Twitter) API free?

No. As of February 6, 2026, X discontinued the free tier for new developers and moved to pay-per-usage pricing — you buy credits and each request deducts a fraction of a cent. The old free tier (roughly 1,500 posts/month write, ~50 reads per 24 hours, no search) is closed to new signups. X grants free access only to "for-good public utility apps" on a case-by-case basis.

How much does the X (Twitter) API cost in 2026?

New developers use pay-per-usage: reading your own posts costs about $0.001 per request, reading a third-party post about $0.005, and posting a link-free tweet about $0.015 (a post containing a URL costs about $0.20). The read ceiling is 2,000,000 posts/month. Legacy subscription tiers — Basic $200/month, Pro $5,000/month, Enterprise $42,000+/month — are grandfathered for existing subscribers but closed to new signups.

What are the X (Twitter) API rate limits?

On pay-per-usage, the practical limit is the 2,000,000 reads/month cap plus your own spending limit. On legacy tiers, limits are per-endpoint: Basic allows 60 recent-search requests per 15 minutes (7-day window only) and ~10,000 reads/month; Pro allows 300 search requests per 15 minutes with full-archive access and ~1,000,000 reads/month. Exceeding a limit returns 429 Too Many Requests. Reads are tracked at the project level; writes have app-level and per-user sub-caps.

How do I get an X (Twitter) API key?

Sign in at console.x.com, create a Project, then create an App inside it — credentials are issued per app. Choose an auth method: OAuth 2.0 App-Only Bearer Token for read-only access to public data, OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE for acting on behalf of a user, or OAuth 1.0a for legacy and media-upload endpoints. For reading public tweets and profiles, the App-Only Bearer Token is the right choice.

What's the difference between Twitter API v2 and v1.1?

API v2 is the standard and the only version receiving new features — pay-per-usage, modern JSON with fields and expansions, edit history, and conversation tracking. Build new integrations on v2. v1.1 is legacy and mostly Enterprise-gated, with one exception: media upload, where the v1.1 endpoint was long the only option. A v2 media upload endpoint is now rolling out, closing that gap.

Can I scrape Twitter without the API?

Scraping X is explicitly prohibited by its Terms of Service, and X has litigated aggressively against scrapers. Nitter, the front-end many tools relied on, broke in early 2024 after X disabled guest accounts and is now effectively dead. For non-prohibited access without the official API's pricing, developers use unified third-party data APIs that cover public X data under their own terms. This is not legal advice.

What's the best alternative to the X (Twitter) API?

For reading tweets, profiles, and search results without the $200/month floor or the $5,000/month full-archive cliff, a unified social data API is the practical answer. SocialCrawl covers X profiles, user tweets, tweet lookup, search, communities, and transcripts alongside 41 other platforms under one API key and one schema, with computed fields included in the response — typically far cheaper than official Pro for read-heavy use cases.