Is the Twitter API free? No. As of November 2026 the official X API is pay per use, so every post your code reads costs $0.005, with no subscription and no free usage tier on its pricing page. If all you want is to know when a few accounts post, AyeWatch does that job without you paying for X API access, from a free preview and paid plans at $9 a month. Nitter, the old free workaround, is archived after legal demands from X Corp.
How X bills API usage
X sells credits upfront in its Developer Console and deducts them as requests run. Reads are priced per resource returned: $0.005 for each post and $0.010 for each user profile, according to X's developer docs. Writes are priced per request. A few details change what a month actually costs:
- Deduplication. If you fetch the same post twice within one UTC day, X charges once. It calls this a soft guarantee, so outages can break it.
- A monthly ceiling. Pay-per-use accounts stop at 3 million post reads per billing cycle; beyond that X points you to Enterprise.
- Guard rails. You can set a spending limit per cycle, after which requests are blocked, and an auto-recharge that tops up when the balance drops.
X notes that prices can change and that the Developer Console shows current rates.
What a month of reads costs
Here is the arithmetic for post reads at the listed rates, next to twitterapi.io, an unofficial third-party API that charges $0.15 per 1,000 tweets.
| Posts read per month | Official X API | twitterapi.io |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $5 | $0.15 |
| 10,000 | $50 | $1.50 |
| 100,000 | $500 | $15 |
| 3,000,000 (X's monthly cap) | $15,000 | $450 |
The table leaves out twitterapi.io's minimum of $0.00015 per request, which applies even to empty results, and X's same-day deduplication, which can lower the official bill if you poll the same posts repeatedly.
The free credits are a promotion, not a tier
X's free credit page offers $20 in credits once you save an eligible card and complete your first purchase, and it matches your first auto-recharge up to $50, for $70 at most. That covers 14,000 post reads at $0.005 each. Useful for testing, but you have to pay before you get it.
Why Nitter no longer fills the gap
Nitter used X's unofficial API, with no developer account, to show profiles and, on some instances, RSS feeds at no cost. X Corp. sent the project cease and desist letters in August and September 2026, and the maintainer archived the GitHub repository on 9 October.
Cheaper ways to get the same posts
AyeWatch, for the follow-accounts job. Most people asking whether the API is free want something narrow: new posts from a list of accounts or a saved search. AyeWatch reads public X profiles, searches and communities with no X login and no X API key, filters posts with a plain-English rule, and sends alerts to its app on every plan. Paid plans, from $9 a month, add email, Slack, webhooks and its own REST API. There is no X developer account to set up and no X API bill on top. See AyeWatch's plans for what each tier includes.
twitterapi.io, for bulk reads. Pay as you go with up to $1 of sign-up credit, but it is not affiliated with or endorsed by X.
Apify, for scheduled scraping. Ready-made X scrapers on a platform with a free plan that includes $5 of monthly usage.
When paying X directly is right
If your product has to follow X's developer terms or needs to post, the official meter is the cost of doing business. Set a spending limit on day one so a runaway loop cannot drain your credits.