X (Twitter) API Pricing in 2026: Pay-Per-Use Rates, Old Tiers, and What a Post Costs

TLDR: Since February 6, 2026 the X API has no subscriptions. You prepay credits and every request costs money: $0.015 to create a post, $0.200 if the post contains a URL, $0.005 to read a post, $0.010 to read a user or follower record. There is no free tier for new developers. The $200 Basic plan was deprecated and its subscribers moved to pay-per-use after June 1, 2026. A tool posting once a day with no links costs about 45 cents a month; the same tool posting 100 link posts a day costs about $600. When credits hit zero you get HTTP 402. Rates below are from docs.x.com, checked September 4, 2026.

How much does the X API cost in 2026?

X’s pricing page states it in one line: “The X API uses pay-per-usage pricing. No subscriptions—pay only for what you use.” You buy credits in the Developer Console, and each request deducts from the balance. The page also says “No contracts, subscriptions, or minimum spend.”

Here’s a full price breakdown:

Reads are priced per resource returned, not per call:

Two other lines on the page affect bills. Pay-per-use plans “are capped at 3 million Post reads per monthly billing cycle,” so a read-heavy product cannot simply buy its way past that. And X runs a rebate: cumulative spend of $200 to $499 earns 10% back as xAI API credits, $500 to $999 earns 15%, and $1,000 or more earns 20%. Those credits are for xAI’s models, not for more X API calls.

One gap: the pricing table lists “Media Metadata” but no separate line for the media upload itself, and we could not find one anywhere official. Treat media upload as unpriced-but-required until X says otherwise.

Is there a free tier for the X API?

No. The pricing page lists no free allowance for new developers. The write-only Free tier that let a hobby bot post around 1,500 times a month (later reported cut to 500) stopped accepting new signups when pay-per-use launched. Secondary reports say recently active Free-tier developers received a one-time $10 credit voucher in the migration; we could not confirm that on an X-owned page, so treat it as reported rather than documented.

The practical floor is whatever credit balance you choose to load. At $0.015 a post, $10 of credit is about 660 plain posts, or 50 posts with links.

What happened to Basic, Pro, and Enterprise?

For three years the X API was sold in fixed tiers. The last known numbers, with the caveat that X has removed the old pages and we relied on TechCrunch’s October 2025 report for prices and on third-party trackers for the caps:

The timeline, as far as we can reconstruct it from X’s developer account and press coverage:

• October 2025: X announced a closed beta of pay-per-use, with a $500 voucher for participants.
• February 6, 2026: pay-per-use launched for everyone. Existing Basic and Pro subscribers could stay on their plans or switch.
• April 2026 (reported): the per-post price rose from $0.01 to $0.015, the $0.20 URL price was confirmed with summoned replies exempt at $0.01, and “Following, Likes, and Quote-Posts via API Writes” were removed from all self-serve tiers. We could not load the original post directly; the wording comes from third-party quotation.
• May 21, 2026 (reported): X announced that “Legacy Basic plans (monthly & annual) are being deprecated. All Basic subscribers will be automatically migrated to the new Pay-Per-Use plan after June 1, 2026.”

The removal of follow, like, and quote-post writes is easy to miss and it breaks a class of engagement tools outright. If your product relied on any of them through the self-serve API, that is a feature you no longer have, at any price.

What does a month of posting actually cost?

The rate card is simple; the bills are not, because one line item dominates. Every example below uses the documented write prices and assumes no reads.

Reads change the picture for analytics. Fetching metrics for 1,000 posts a day costs $5 a day in post reads, about $150 a month, before any user or follower lookups at twice the rate. A dashboard that refreshes every account’s follower count hourly is paying $0.010 per account per hour for the privilege.

Three consequences follow for anyone designing a product on top of this:

1. Links are the cost driver. A post with a URL costs 13.3 times a post without one. X has not published the rule for what counts as a URL, so assume any http or https string in the text triggers it. Products that append tracking links to every post should price that in.
2. Poll less, cache more. Reads are per resource, and owned reads of your own app’s data cost a fifth of standard reads. Store what you fetch.
3. Low volume is cheaper than it ever was. A tool posting a few times a day for one account now costs cents. The old $200 floor was the thing that priced out small developers, and it is gone.

Post length has no price attached: a 280-character post and a 25,000-character Premium long post cost the same request fee. Our X character-limit guide covers which accounts can post long.

How do credits, auto-recharge, and spend caps work?

Billing is prepaid. In the Developer Console you buy a credit balance, and each request deducts its price. Three controls sit around that balance:

• Auto-recharge tops the balance up when it falls below a threshold you set, using a saved payment method. X limits it to one top-up per five-minute window, which is worth knowing if a burst of traffic drains the balance faster than that.
• Spend cap sets a maximum per billing cycle. When you reach it, requests are blocked until the next cycle. This is the one setting that guarantees a runaway loop cannot cost more than you decided.
• No commitment. There is nothing to cancel; stop making requests and the spend stops.

A minimum top-up amount is commonly quoted online, but we could not confirm one on X’s own pages and are not repeating a number.

What happens when credits run out: 402 and 429

Two different failures look similar from a log file.

HTTP 402 Payment Required means the balance is empty. Requests keep failing until auto-recharge fires or you top up. Because it is a billing state, retrying does nothing; alert a human. Developer forum threads describe the error as a credits-depleted message; we could not fetch the exact JSON body, so log the full response the first time you see it.

HTTP 429 Too Many Requests is a rate limit, and it is independent of credit. The response carries x-rate-limit-limit, x-rate-limit-remaining, and x-rate-limit-reset headers, the last one a Unix timestamp; sleep until then and retry. X’s rate-limits reference is the source for per-endpoint windows; for creating posts the documented figures are 100 requests per 15 minutes per user and 10,000 per 24 hours per app. Community threads quote other numbers for other access levels, so verify against the headers you actually receive rather than a table.

The design rule: treat 429 as transient and 402 as terminal until money moves.

Who pays when you post through a tool?

The X Developer Agreement puts the obligation on the developer: “you agree: (i) to pay the price listed for the Paid Service, along with any additional amounts relating to applicable taxes, surcharges, credit card fees, bank fees, foreign transaction fees, foreign exchange fees, and currency fluctuations, on a recurring basis.” X has no billing relationship with a third-party tool’s end users, so every scheduler, unified API, and agent platform that posts to X is paying these rates and deciding how to recover them.

PostZen passes them through at X’s exact rates with zero markup, billed alongside your plan:

Media upload and token-refresh calls are metered so you can see them but are never billed. Plan fees and included accounts do not offset X pass-through, which is why connecting an X account on PostZen requires a card on file even on the free plan; the mechanics are on the billing page and the pricing page. Other vendors take the same approach with their own rates; when you compare tools, ask for the X line specifically, because it is the only platform in the ten we cover that meters publishing.

Is the X API worth paying for?

For publishing, usually yes, and more so than before. A product that posts for its users pays cents per post and nothing for idle accounts, where the old Basic plan charged $200 before the first post. The two things to model carefully are links, which multiply the cost by thirteen, and analytics reads, which accrue per resource and add up quietly.

For engagement automation, the answer changed in April. Follows, likes, and quote posts are gone from self-serve writes, so no amount of credit buys them back.

If X is one network among several, the API cost is a rounding error next to the integration cost: OAuth 2.0 with two-hour tokens and rotating refresh tokens, chunked media upload, and a 280-character weighted count that is easy to get wrong. That is the part PostZen’s X integration and social media API remove, with the X fees themselves passed straight through.