If your X integration stopped working this year and you went looking for the free tier, it is gone. Not reduced — gone.
This is what replaced it, priced out at volumes you might actually run. Every figure below comes from X's own pricing documentation, read on 7 September 2026. Where I could not confirm something at the source, I say so rather than estimating.
What the pricing actually is now
There are no named subscription tiers to compare any more. X moved to pay-per-use: you buy credits up front in the Developer Console, and each request deducts from them.
Reads are charged per resource returned, not per request. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and I will come back to it.
| What you read | Price per resource |
|---|---|
| Posts | $0.005 |
| Users | $0.010 |
| Lists | $0.005 |
| Likes | $0.001 |
| Your own data ("owned reads") | $0.001 |
Writes are charged per request instead, from $0.005 to $0.200 depending on the action. Creating a post costs $0.015. Creating a post with a URL in it costs $0.200 — thirteen times more, which is a pricing decision with an opinion inside it.
And the headline: there is no free tier. Not a smaller one, not a rate-limited one. The documentation offers no free option at all.
What that costs at real volumes
Per-resource pricing is easy to underestimate, because the unit is small and the multiplier is not. The arithmetic, using X's own numbers:
| You read | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1,000 posts | $5 |
| 10,000 posts | $50 |
| 100,000 posts | $500 |
| 1,000 user profiles | $10 |
A single search returning 100 posts costs 50 cents. Run that hourly for a month and you are at $360 — for one query, refreshed hourly, on one keyword.
That is the number worth sitting with before you architect anything. The old free tier taught a generation of developers to poll cheerfully. Polling is now a line item.
Two things that change the maths, and are easy to miss
The 24-hour rule works in your favour
X's documentation states that the same resource requested twice within 24 hours is only charged once.
This is genuinely useful and almost nobody factors it in. If your job re-reads the same 500 posts every hour to watch their engagement climb, you are not paying 24 × 500 per day. You are paying closer to 500, plus whatever is genuinely new.
It also quietly changes what architecture is sensible. Re-reading a known set is cheap; discovering new sets is what costs. Design around that and the same budget goes several times further.
There is a ceiling, and it is not negotiable at your tier
Pay-per-use is capped at 3 million post reads per monthly billing cycle. Above that you are into Enterprise, which means a sales conversation rather than a credit card.
Three million sounds enormous until you divide it: it is about 4,100 posts an hour, continuously. A moderately busy monitoring product touches that ceiling.
The xAI credit, which is a real discount with a catch
Spending on X API credits earns back xAI API credits — 10–15% at $200–$999 of cumulative spend, up to 20% above $1,000.
Read it plainly: it is a discount denominated in someone else's product. If you were going to buy xAI inference anyway, it is worth real money. If you were not, it is worth nothing, and it should not appear in your cost model as though it were cash back.
What I could not confirm
The exact date in February 2026, and the precise terms of the transition for developers who were on the old free tier.
X's own announcement forum returns 403 to automated requests, so I could not read the announcement body at the source. Search results show official announcement threads titled around pay-per-use launching and legacy free users being migrated with a one-time voucher, and secondary reporting puts the announcement at 6 February 2026 — but I did not verify that date against X's own text, so I am not going to state it as though I had.
The prices above are different: those I read directly from X's pricing documentation.
There is a trap for anyone researching this, too. X also killed free API access in February 2023, and that announcement is still widely linked. Two February cut-offs, three years apart, and search results mix them freely. If a source about "the February change" does not say which year, it is not usable.
What people are actually doing instead
Four honest options, and the fourth is underrated.
Pay for it. If X data is genuinely your product, the pricing is survivable at small volume and the 24-hour rule helps more than it looks. The failure mode is not the price — it is discovering the 3M ceiling after you have built for growth.
Move to a platform that still has an open surface. Bluesky's API is open and free, and Mastodon instances serve public timelines. Neither has X's volume. Whether that matters depends on whether you needed X specifically or needed public conversation, and those get conflated constantly.
Buy from a reseller. Several vendors sell X data collected from public pages. They are compared here with real pricing. The trade-offs are the usual: you are exposed to a middleman who can change what comes back, and who may compete with you.
Ask whether you need per-post data at all. The question behind most X integrations is "is this topic growing?" — which is a question about change over time, not about individual posts. It is answered by an archive rather than a firehose, and at a fraction of the reads. That is the other product here, and it is live today.
The part worth remembering
The specific prices will drift. What will not is the shift underneath them, and it is the same shift Reddit made three months later: public conversation data stopped being infrastructure and became inventory.
Every platform that can meter it is metering it. Build as though the free surface you are using today has a price attached tomorrow, because on current evidence it does.
The route we picked is to collect from public pages ourselves rather than through a reseller — designed and measured, and not yet running. The position, including the uncomfortable parts, is on the social data page. No social endpoint of ours is live yet, and that page says so rather than listing what does not exist.
Prices, the 24-hour deduplication rule, the 3M cap and the xAI credit tiers were read from X's own API pricing documentation on 7 September 2026 — primary source. The February announcement date is from secondary reporting and is flagged as unverified above. This pricing has changed twice in three years; verify before you commit engineering time.