---
title: "X API pricing in 2026: 10,000 post reads now cost 50 USD"
description: "What the X API costs in 2026: 0.005 USD per post read, 0.015 to create one, a 3 million read cap, and what a logged-out browser agent reads for nothing."
canonical: "https://scalebrowser.net/blog/x-api-pricing"
last_modified: "2026-10-13"
published: "2026-10-13"
author: "elias"
category: "use-cases"
---
> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://scalebrowser.net/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# X API pricing in 2026: 10,000 post reads now cost 50 USD
> What the X API costs in 2026: 0.005 USD per post read, 0.015 to create one, a 3 million read cap, and what a logged-out browser agent reads for nothing.
You launched a product on Tuesday and you want to read every reply on X. You ask your agent what that costs, and it answers with a unit instead of a plan: 0.005 USD per post read. Half a cent is also the whole bill, because there is no seat price and no tier to pick. Here is what the unit adds up to, what changed on 6 February, and what the same job costs in a browser.
## How much does the X API cost?
The X API charges 0.005 USD for each post it returns and 0.015 USD for each post you create. The prices come from X's [pricing page](https://docs.x.com/x-api/getting-started/pricing), which we read on 11 October 2026; the last column is our arithmetic on those prices.
| Action | Price | Unit | Per 1,000 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Read a post | 0.005 USD | per post returned | 5 USD |
| Look up a user | 0.010 USD | per user returned | 10 USD |
| Read your own data | 0.001 USD | per resource | 1 USD |
| Create a post | 0.015 USD | per request | 15 USD |
| Create a post with a URL | 0.200 USD | per request | 200 USD |
| Monthly read cap | 3,000,000 reads | per billing cycle | 15,000 USD at the cap |
Credits are bought upfront in the Developer Console and used up as requests are made, and you can set a spending limit per billing cycle. A post you read twice on the same UTC day is billed once; X calls that a soft guarantee. Past 3 million reads in a month you need an Enterprise plan.
## What happened to the free and Basic tiers?
The free tier is gone for anyone starting now: X's pricing page lists none and promises "No contracts, subscriptions, or minimum spend". X's [changelog](https://docs.x.com/changelog) calls the old one the Legacy Free tier and dates the change in three steps.
- **20 October 2025:** X announces a limited closed pilot of credit-based pricing, at 0.005 USD per post read and 0.01 USD per user read.
- **6 February 2026:** pay-per-use launches. Recently active Legacy Free users get a one-time 10 USD voucher, and "Basic and Pro plans remain available, and existing subscribers can opt in to Pay-Per-Use".
- **2 October 2026:** a new account earns a one-time 20 USD when it saves its first eligible payment card, and its first auto-recharge is matched up to 50 USD.
At 0.005 USD a read, the 20 USD buys 4,000 post reads and the full 70 USD buys 14,000. That is a trial, not a free tier.
### What do 10,000, 100,000 and 1 million reads cost?
10,000 reads cost 50 USD, 100,000 cost 500 USD and 1 million cost 5,000 USD at 0.005 USD each.
| Reads per month | Cost | Per day | Share of the 3 million cap |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 10,000 | 50 USD | about 333 | under 1 in 300 |
| 100,000 | 500 USD | about 3,333 | 1 in 30 |
| 1,000,000 | 5,000 USD | about 33,333 | 1 in 3 |
At 10,000 you are one person following one topic for a month, say the replies to your launch and the posts that quote it. At 100,000 you are a small team watching several brands every day. At 1 million you are running a product whose own users expect X data in it, and the bill is a line in your margin.
## What does reading X cost without the API?
Reading X in a browser costs a plan instead of a price per post: Scalebrowser Start is 19 EUR a month for one browser at a time on one machine, with unlimited profiles, according to [its pricing page](https://scalebrowser.net/pricing). An agent that works [reading X in an agent's browser](/blog/ai-agent-browser) opens the page as you would and reads it as text, so no post is billed.
What it reads depends on whether it is signed in. We measured the logged-out half on 11 October 2026: a fresh profile, no account, the pages any visitor loads, 13 page loads in about 4 minutes of wall-clock time with the agent's own turns included.
| Page | Loads | Posts visible | What ended the page |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| x.com/AnthropicAI | 3 | 5 each time | page ends after 5 posts |
| x.com/OpenAI | 3 | 5 each time (the first pinned) | page ends after 5 posts |
| x.com/nasa | 3 | 5 each time | page ends after 5 posts |
| x.com/search?q=browser agent | 4 | 0 | 3 sign-in dialogs, 1 error page |
After the fifth post each page ended in a bar that offered the full profile with a Continue to X button; our profile showed it in German. It was there on all 9 loads, on one of them a moment after the posts. The same 5 posts came back on every reload, so 9 profile loads read 15 different posts, which the API would bill at 0.075 USD.
Search did not work logged out: 3 of 4 loads went straight to a sign-in dialog, and the fourth showed an error page that said the page was down. We used no account, so this is the free ceiling and says nothing about a signed-in volume.
### What stops an agent at X sign-in?
At X sign-in the agent met a dialog and no puzzle: continue with a phone number, Google or Apple, or type an email address or username. Whether a puzzle follows depends on how the site rates the visit. Our August measurement of [the Arkose puzzle at sign-in](/blog/captcha-solving) tried X's login and sign-up pages among its 5 attempts and was never shown one, and on 11 October we typed no credentials into X at all.
## Which route fits which reader?
A product that resells X data needs the API, and research or posting from one account fits the browser. The deciding questions are who owns the account and how many posts you need.
| Reader | Route | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| A dashboard or product that resells X data | API | billed per post, no session to keep alive, 3 million reads a month before Enterprise |
| A person or team researching and posting from one account | Signed-in browser | a plan price, and the agent reads search, threads and replies as you do |
| Someone who reads a few public profiles | Logged-out browser | 5 posts per profile page, nothing to sign in to |
| A job that needs exact counts over millions of posts | API, then Enterprise | the cap and the billing are documented |
Both routes can sit behind [an X MCP server](/blog/x-mcp), which is how an agent in Claude Desktop reaches either one. Research that has to cover X next to Reddit and LinkedIn is [market research that includes X](/blog/market-research-ai), where a fetch tool read 0 of 3 X posts.
#### Where does the browser run?
The browser runs on your own machine, so the account's sign-in and the posts it reads stay there. For the job pages that go with this one, see the [use cases overview](/use-cases) and [tools with no API](/use-cases/tools-with-no-api).