X API pricing in 2026, and the alternative
The official X API charges per post read. Here is what it costs next to a read-only provider.
What the official X API costs
In 2026 X moved developers from the Basic and Pro subscriptions to pay-per-use. A post read costs $5.00 per 1,000. A profile read costs more. The same prices reach the SpaceXAI API from 2026-09-21, where X Search moved from a price per tool call to a price per item returned: $5.00 per 1,000 posts and $10.00 per 1,000 profiles.
The official API is the right choice when you need write access to your own account, real-time streams, or a contract with X. For reading public posts and profiles, it is 40 to 80 times the price of a read-only provider.
| Official X API | xdataapi.io | |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 posts | $5.00 | $0.125 down to $0.06 |
| 1,000 profiles | $10.00 | $0.125 down to $0.06 |
| 1,000 followers | per profile price | $0.0125 down to $0.006 (0.1 credit each) |
| Empty search | charged per call | free |
| Developer account | required, reviewed | email sign-in, no card for the first 5,000 credits |
| Write access | yes | no, read-only |
| Real-time stream | yes | no, polling with cursors |
| Uptime evidence | status page | per-endpoint checks, 30 days, every incident |
What you give up
No writes, no streams, no direct messages, no private data. xdataapi.io reads what a logged-out visitor can see on x.com and nothing else. Likes on a post are not available to anyone but the author, so there is no endpoint for them.
No contract with X. The service is not affiliated with X Corp. What you get instead is a public record of whether it works: a probe outside our network calls the public API once a minute and a canary calls X directly, and both feeds are published per endpoint with 30 days of history.
Prices
Official prices as published at docs.x.com and in the SpaceXAI API notice of 2026-09-10. xdataapi.io prices are the packs below; one credit is one tweet or one profile.
| Pack | Price | Credits | Per 1,000 tweets or profiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5,000 | once, no card |
| Starter | $10 | 80,000 | $0.125 |
| Builder | $50 | 500,000 | $0.100 |
| Growth | $200 | 2,500,000 | $0.080 |
| Scale | $600 | 10,000,000 | $0.060 |
Moving over
The endpoints have the same names. Change the base URL to https://api.xdataapi.io, send the key in the x-api-key header, and read data from each response. Cursor pagination works the same way: pass next_cursor back as cursor.
Agents need no code at all: connect the hosted MCP server at https://api.xdataapi.io/mcp. It signs in with OAuth, or takes the same header. The migration notes list every field that differs.
Every new account gets 5,000 credits with no card, which is enough to run your existing integration against both providers and compare the answers before you move traffic.