X API pricing (2026)

A plain post costs $0.015, so 1,000 posts cost $15. A post with a link costs $0.200, so 1,000 linked posts cost $200. Those two lines are the whole posting bill for most bots and agents; media metadata, reads and deletes are priced separately and only apply if you call them.

X bills against credits you buy in advance. There's no monthly subscription and no minimum spend, and X's page says prices are subject to change, so treat the table above as a snapshot and check the developer console before you commit to a budget.

X's pricing page doesn't describe a free tier. It describes pay-per-use credits, with two incentives for new payers: $20 in API credits after you save a card and make a first purchase, and a match of your first auto-recharge up to $50.

At $0.015 a post, the $20 incentive covers about 1,333 plain posts or 100 linked posts. For a hobby bot posting a few times a day without links, that's months of posting; our X bot guide walks through building one.

X lists "Post: Create (with URL)" as its own request type at $0.200, about 13.3 times the $0.015 plain rate. The pricing page doesn't define what counts as a URL; our preflight treats any http:// or https:// in the text as a link and warns with x_link_cost.

A common tip is to move the link into a reply. By X's price list that doesn't save money through the API: the reply is itself a post with a URL, so the pair costs $0.215, a little more than the single linked post. The savings only come from leaving the link off X.

With a unified API you can do that per network. Set platform_options.x.text to a version without the link, and Bluesky and LinkedIn still get the full text. At 20 posts a day, that one field is the difference between $9 and $120 a month.

curl https://socialsforai.vercel.app/v1/posts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SOCIALS_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "accounts": ["acc_x", "acc_bluesky", "acc_linkedin"],
    "text": "Release notes for v2.3: https://example.com/changelog",
    "platform_options": { "x": { "text": "v2.3 is out. Notes are on our site." } }
  }'

You load credits, X draws them down per request, and when the balance goes negative requests are blocked until you top up. Auto-recharge tops up at a threshold you set, at most once per 5-minute window.

You can set a spending limit per billing cycle. Once it's reached, X blocks API requests until the next cycle, which is the cheapest insurance against a runaway loop that posts the same link a thousand times.

• Read cap: pay-per-use plans stop at 3 million post reads per monthly cycle; above that X asks you to request an Enterprise plan.
• Deduplication: re-requesting a billed resource within the same UTC day isn't charged again. X calls this a soft guarantee.
• xAI credits: link your xAI team and X returns 10% of cumulative spend from $200, 15% from $500 and 20% from $1,000 in xAI API credits, reset each cycle.
• Owned reads: your app reading its own posts, bookmarks, followers, likes and lists costs $0.001 per resource instead of $0.005.

Creating posts is limited to 100 requests per 15 minutes per user and 10,000 per 24 hours per app, according to X's rate limit table. Deleting is 50 per 15 minutes per user. Looking up a post is 900 per 15 minutes per user and 450 per app.

Media upload (POST /2/media/upload) allows 500 per 15 minutes per user. Over a limit, X returns HTTP 429 with error code 88, "Rate limit exceeded", and documents x-rate-limit-remaining and x-rate-limit-reset headers for pacing.

Through us, a 429 becomes platform_rate_limited and retries on our backoff schedule. We also cap each X account at 100 posts per 24 hours as a fair-use limit, which returns daily_cap_reached before anything is sent.

Posting needs an OAuth 2.0 user-context token with tweet.read, tweet.write and users.read, per X's create-post reference; we also request media.write for image uploads and offline.access for refresh tokens. You send JSON to POST https://api.x.com/2/tweets; the response's data object carries the new post's id and text.

A post takes up to 4 photos, 1 animated GIF or 1 video, uploaded first to get media ids. Quote posts need an Enterprise plan, per X's create-post reference, so they aren't available on pay-per-use.

curl -X POST https://api.x.com/2/tweets \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $X_USER_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "text": "Hello from the X API" }'

# 201 → { "data": { "id": "...", "text": "Hello from the X API" } }

SocialsForAI passes X's per-request charges through at cost, with an X credit included on paid plans: $2 on Hobby, $5 on Pro, $15 on Growth and $40 on Scale. Worked example: 20 plain posts a day to one X account is $9.00 of X fees a month; on Pro the $5 credit covers part of it, leaving $4.00 on top of the $29 plan.

After publishing we read each X post back once to confirm it exists, which is at most one $0.005 read per post. Paid billing isn't switched on yet; every workspace starts on Free, and X posting is live on our API. Plan details are on pricing.

When a post bound for X has a link, the 201 response carries the warning below so an agent can decide whether the link is worth $0.185 extra. Agents get the same warning through the X MCP server.

"warnings": [
  {
    "account_id": "acc_x",
    "platform": "x",
    "severity": "warning",
    "code": "x_link_cost",
    "message": "Posts with a URL cost $0.200 through the X API instead of $0.015 (docs.x.com pricing).",
    "fix": "Remove the link, or send a link-free version for X in platform_options.x.text. A link in a reply is also billed at the with-URL rate."
  }
]

Most of the bill is links, so most of the savings are too. In rough order of impact:

• Drop the link on X only, with platform_options.x.text. Keep it on networks where links are free.
• Set a spending limit in the X developer console so a bug can't drain your credits.
• Don't read what you don't need. Reads are $0.005 each; owned reads are $0.001.
• Use dry_run: true to test. Our preflight never calls X, so testing costs nothing.
• Fit posts in 280 weighted characters the first time with the X character counter; the X character limit page explains why a URL always counts as 23.