X API pricing in 2026: what posting really costs

The X API, formerly the Twitter API, now uses pay-per-use pricing. Developers buy credits in the Developer Console, and every request deducts a fixed amount. Creating a post costs $0.015, publishing a post that contains a URL costs $0.20, and reading a post costs $0.005. X’s pricing page lists no monthly subscription, and new accounts can earn up to $70 in promotional credits. Publishing one post a day without links costs about 45 cents a month.

Prices changed twice in 2026, and the top news result for this search still quotes the old price of a post. The figures below come from X’s developer docs, read on October 17, 2026, with each change dated. The worked examples are priced by the same code SocialHelper uses before it posts to X.

What the X API costs in 2026

Pay-per-use is X’s pricing model with no subscription: you prepay for credits, and each request uses some at a fixed rate (X: Pay-per-usage pricing). Writes are charged per request and reads per item returned. These are the rates that publishing and scheduling applications encounter most often.

• Owned reads are reads of your own app owner’s data, such as your posts, mentions, followers and bookmarks. They cost $0.001 an item, or 1,000 for $1.
• A summoned reply is a reply to someone who mentioned or quoted your account. Since February 23, 2026, those are the only replies the API allows on self-serve plans.
• Deduplication means the same post read twice in one UTC day is charged once. X calls this “a soft guarantee”.

Pay-per-use plans are also “capped at 3 million Post reads per monthly billing cycle”. Past that, X points you to an Enterprise plan.

What one post costs

The price of a post depends on whether it contains a URL. X’s pricing documentation doesn’t define exactly what qualifies, so SocialHelper treats anything X would convert into a link as a URL, including a bare domain without https://. SocialHelper’s X integration priced these four posts, and our automated tests verify the results.

“Version 2.0” isn’t a link, because 2.0 isn’t a domain. Both link versions count as 38 characters toward X’s 280, because X counts every link as 23 characters. The X character counter shows the same count as you type.

What a month of posting costs

Monthly spending scales directly with volume. The figures below include only post creation, calculated over 30 days at X’s current published prices.

For comparison, the former Basic subscription cost $200 a month. An application that only publishes now pays less than that until it sends roughly 1,000 link posts a month. Reading data adds to the total. An application that checks its own recent posts, as SocialHelper does before retrying an unclear post, pays the owned-read rate of $0.001 per item.

How X API pricing changed

X’s published pricing has changed several times within a single year. This timeline draws on X’s official changelog and announcements on its developer forum.

1. October 20, 2025: the pilot. X opened a pay-per-use pilot to a small group, charging $0.01 to create a post. The subscription plans then were “Free: $0, Basic: $200/month, Pro: $5,000/month” (X Developers forum: Pay-per-use pilot).
2. February 6, 2026: the launch. Pay-per-use opened to everyone, with a new Developer Console and up to 20% back in xAI API credits (X: Changelog). Recently active users of the old Free tier got a one-time $10 voucher. X said “Basic and Pro plans remain available, and existing subscribers can opt in to Pay-Per-Use”.
3. February 23, 2026: replies. Programmatic replies became limited to posts where the author mentioned or quoted the replying account.
4. April 20, 2026: the price rise. Creating a post went from $0.01 to $0.015, and a post with a URL went to $0.20. Owned reads dropped to $0.001. Following, liking and quote-posting through the API were removed from self-serve plans (X Developers forum: April 2026 pricing update).
5. October 2, 2026: free credits. New pay-per-use accounts can earn $20 for a first credit purchase with a saved card, and up to $50 matching their first auto-recharge.

News coverage from February 2026, such as MediaNama’s report on the launch, gave the earlier $0.010 price for a post. That was correct until April 20.

Is there a free X API?

Not as a plan. The pricing page describes only prepaid credits, and the changelog refers to the old free plan as the “Legacy Free tier”. What developers can still receive is promotional credit. A new account earns $20 when it buys credits for the first time with a saved card, and a match of its first auto-recharge up to $50, so $70 in total (X: Free credit incentives). Those credits expire 3 months after they’re granted and are spent before the credits you paid for. X notes the incentives are still rolling out.

Spending also earns xAI API credits back. Cumulative spending of $200 to $499 in a billing cycle earns 10%, $500 to $999 earns 15%, and $1,000 or more earns 20% (X: Free xAI API credits). Separately, X says public utility apps “continue to receive free scaled access”.

Limits that apply on any budget

Paying doesn’t lift every limit. Creating posts through POST /2/tweets is limited to 100 per 15 minutes for each user and 10,000 a day for each app (X: Rate limits). X’s Developer Agreement also limits who self-serve plans are for. Pay-per-use, Basic and Pro are “designed for hobbyists, commercial prototyping, initial development, early-stage X product integrations, and supporting applications with a limited number of end-users”. Beyond that, you need an Enterprise plan (X Developer Agreement, section L).

Keep the bill under control

1. Set a spending limit. The Developer Console lets you cap spending per billing cycle. Once you reach the cap, requests are blocked until the next cycle begins.
2. Decide on auto-recharge. It tops up automatically when your balance drops below a threshold, at most once every 5 minutes, so a sudden burst of requests can still exhaust your credits.
3. Monitor usage programmatically. GET /2/usage/tweets returns daily post consumption, so you can trigger an alert before the balance gets low.
4. Reserve links for the posts that need them. At $0.20 against $0.015, links account for most of the potential cost.

If the balance does run out, X blocks the calls until you add credits. X notes that “it is possible for an account credit balance to go slightly negative”. SocialHelper turns that error into a plain message on the post: the X developer account behind the app is out of credits, and an admin needs to add more.

What it means for scheduling tools

A scheduler that posts to X pays X for every post it sends. In SocialHelper, posting to X comes with paid plans as a monthly allowance. It isn’t part of the free early access plan, because every X post costs money. Each post is priced before it’s created, with or without a link, and a post that would go over the allowance is refused with what’s left and when it resets. Failed or cancelled posts don’t count. The X integration page lists what SocialHelper supports there, and images are supported while video isn’t yet.

curl https://socialhelper.app/api/v1/posts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOCIALHELPER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -d '{
      "text": "New menu today 🥐",
      "accounts": [
          "X_ACCOUNT_ID"
      ]
  }'

That request costs $0.015. Adding a link to the text would increase it to $0.20. The comparison of social media APIs shows that X is the only one of ten big platforms that charges per post, and the guide to idempotent posting explains why SocialHelper checks before it retries a paid call.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the X API cost?

It’s pay-per-use, so the cost depends entirely on your requests. Creating a post costs $0.015, or $0.20 with a URL, and reading a post costs $0.005. You purchase credits in advance, and there’s no monthly subscription fee.

Is the Twitter API free?

No. X’s pricing page no longer lists a free tier, although new accounts can earn up to $70 in promotional credits that expire three months after they’re granted.

How do I get an X API key?

Register at console.x.com and create an application, which generates its keys and access tokens (X: About the X API). Then purchase credits so that your requests are processed.

What is the X API rate limit for posting?

For POST /2/tweets it’s 100 posts per 15 minutes per user, and 10,000 a day per app. Other endpoints have their own limits.

Are the Basic and Pro plans still available?

When pay-per-use launched on February 6, 2026, X said Basic and Pro “remain available” and existing subscribers could switch. X’s pricing page today describes only pay-per-use credits.

How we checked

We read X’s pricing, free credits, rate limits, changelog and Developer Agreement pages on October 17, 2026, plus the two X Staff announcements on its developer forum. Then we ran a fact check of every price and date against them. We measured the example prices with SocialHelper’s X integration on October 17, 2026, and our test suite checks the same four posts every time it runs.

If you spot a price that has changed, contact us and we’ll correct it.