X no longer sells API access as a subscription to new developers. It sells credits, and it bills them per resource returned. That is a better deal than the old Basic and Pro tiers for anyone with light usage, and a considerably worse one for anyone reading at volume. This is the price list and the arithmetic, verified 15 September 2026.
The per-resource price list
The unit is a resource — one post, one user, one like — not one HTTP request. A single call that returns a hundred posts bills a hundred post reads.
| Resource | Per resource | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Posts: Read | $0.005 | $5.00 |
| User: Read | $0.010 | $10.00 |
| Like: Read | $0.001 | $1.00 |
| Owned reads (your own data) | $0.001 | $1.00 |
Source: https://docs.x.com/x-api/getting-started/pricing
What that costs in practice
The trap is the difference between calls and resources. People budget for the former and get billed for the latter. Three worked examples:
- A profile-lookup bot. 5,000 user lookups a month at $0.010 each is $50. It reads one user per call, so calls and resources line up and the estimate holds.
- A brand-mention monitor. Polling a search every five minutes is about 8,600 calls a month. If each returns 20 posts, that is 172,000 post reads — $860, not the $43 you would get by pricing the calls.
- A giveaway draw. One tweet with 3,000 retweeters and 800 repliers is roughly 3,800 resources, near $19 for a single draw, before you fetch any of those users' profiles.
Estimate in resources, not requests. Take your expected page size and multiply. The number is usually an order of magnitude above the first guess.
The Enterprise cliff
Standard access stops at 3 million post reads per billing cycle. Past that you are negotiating an Enterprise contract, which is a sales process with a minimum commitment rather than a checkbox. If your roadmap crosses 3M reads a month, factor in the procurement time, not just the money.
There is no free tier
Credits are bought up front and there is no complimentary allowance for new developers. Practically, that means you cannot evaluate the official API before paying for it — which is the single biggest reason developers end up on third-party read APIs, most of which hand out trial credit without a card.
When the official API is still the right answer
Price is not the only axis, and for several jobs there is no alternative worth discussing:
- Writing. Posting, replying, liking, following, and DMs. Third-party read APIs do not do this, and the ones that claim to are putting your account at risk.
- Ads and partner products. Only available through an official contract.
- Streaming. Filtered stream and firehose access are official-only.
- Compliance. If you need a contractual guarantee about data provenance and deletion, you need a contract with X.
When it is not
For plain public reads — profiles, timelines, search, replies, follow graphs — $5.00 per 1,000 posts is between 30× and 100× what third-party read APIs charge. TwitterAPI.io lists $0.15 per 1,000 tweets. Probe Uranus works out near $0.05 per 1,000 at full use of a flat monthly plan. We put the whole spread, including where each option loses, on the comparison page, and the field is covered in more depth in X API alternatives.
Before you buy anything
- Write down expected resources per month, not calls.
- Double it. Page sizes, retries, and pagination overshoot always cost more than the plan says.
- Decide whether you need writes or streaming. If yes, the official API is in your stack regardless and the only question is what else joins it.
- Check the price on the vendor's own page. Including this one — every figure here is dated 15 September 2026 and the market moves.