X.com API Pricing Analysis
Comparing X's new pay-per-use pricing vs twitterapi.io's existing pricing
X took a lot of flack for the massive price increases a couple of years ago, and they seem to have rolled that back. It seems pretty cheap, but is it?
I’ve used twitterapi.io for my X API access. I’ve no idea how they work - they either scrape massive amounts of content, or they paid the much higher fee for API access and simply resell it. Either way, it works for me.
So I thought I’d run a comparison.
Caveat: I cannot seem to see the prices, so I’m taking these figures from a screenshot of someone who has.
Read Operations
This is what I use it for, and the numbers don’t need any explanation.
Operation | X Official | twitterapi.io | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
Read Tweets | $5.00 / 1K | $0.15 / 1K | ~33x cheaper |
Read User Profiles | $10.00 / 1K | $0.18 / 1K | ~55x cheaper |
Read DM Events | $10.00 / 1K | Not listed | — |
Read Followers | Not listed | $0.15 / 1K | — |
At 50,000 tweet reads per month — a modest volume for any data-driven application — you’d be looking at $250/month on X Official versus roughly $7.50/month on twitterapi.io.
Write Operations
The difference narrows on write operations, but twitterapi.io still comes in cheaper.
Operation | X Official | twitterapi.io | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
Create Tweet | $0.010 / request | $0.003 / call | ~3x cheaper |
Retweet | $0.015 / request | $0.002 / call | ~7x cheaper |
Create DM | $0.015 / request | $0.003 / call | ~5x cheaper |
Note: twitterapi.io requires a login call at $0.003 per call for write operations. I’ve not used it, but it seems that this returns a cookie that you then re-use in write operations, so I think it’s a one-time cost per user account for a certain amount of time.
Cost at Scale
To put this in practical terms, here’s what a moderate-usage application might look like per month:
Activity | Volume | X Official | twitterapi.io |
|---|---|---|---|
Read tweets | 10,000 | $50.00 | $1.50 |
Read profiles | 5,000 | $50.00 | $0.90 |
Create tweets | 1,000 | $10.00 | $3.00–$6.00 |
Retweets | 500 | $7.50 | $1.00–$2.50 |
Total | $117.50 | $6.40–$10.90 |
That’s roughly a 10–18x cost reduction for a mixed read/write workload.
So Why Would Anyone Use X’s Official API?
Price isn’t everything. There are legitimate reasons to stick with the official offering:
- Terms of Service compliance. twitterapi.io is a third-party service operating outside of X’s official partner ecosystem. Depending on your use case, this may carry legal, operational, or platform risk.
- Uptime guarantees. Official APIs typically come with SLAs that third-party scrapers cannot match.
- Rate Limiting. twitterapi.io have their rate limits here, but again I can’t see X’s rate limits.
Summary
For read-heavy workloads — monitoring, analytics, research, aggregation — twitterapi.io is overwhelmingly cheaper.
For write operations, twitterapi.io is still 2–7x cheaper, with some slight complexity around the login issue, but Twitter will have the same kind of requirements, obviously.
At no price point or scale does X’s official API appear to win on cost. The decision to use it comes down to risk tolerance, compliance requirements, and whether you need endpoints that third-party services don’t cover.