X (Twitter) API
Tweets, users, search, timelines, streaming and spaces
Freemium
✓ Verified
🇺🇸 United States
The X (formerly Twitter) API v2 provides access to tweets, user profiles, timelines, search, filtered streams, and Spaces audio conversations. The free tier is severely limited for reading since the 2023 pricing overhaul — just 1 app, 1,500 monthly tweet posts, and minimal read access. The Basic plan at $100/month provides 500,000 tweet reads/month. The Pro plan ($5,000/month) offers higher volume. Despite pricing criticism, X remains the most important platform for real-time public conversation data and is irreplaceable for social listening, sentiment analysis, and news monitoring applications.
API Details
Auth Method
API Key
Pricing Model
Freemium
Free Tier
Yes — 1,500 tweet posts/month free (very limited read)
Rate Limit
Varies by tier; Basic: 500K tweets/month read
Format
REST / JSON / Streaming
Versioning
v2
SLA / Uptime
Not published
Compliance
GDPR
Geographic Restrictions
Global (some regional restrictions)
Last Verified
2026-02-20
Categories
Frequently Asked Questions
X API pricing after the 2023 restructure: Free tier (write-only, 1,500 tweets/month), Basic ($100/month, read/write, 10,000 tweets/month), Pro ($5,000/month, 1 million tweets/month), Enterprise (custom). The elimination of the previous free academic and developer tier caused significant disruption for researchers and open-source projects.
Twitter API v1.1 was deprecated and shut down in February 2023 as part of Elon Musk's post-acquisition restructuring. All developers must now use API v2, which has a different authentication model (OAuth 2.0 PKCE for user context, Bearer token for app-only) and different endpoint structure. Most v1.1 functionality is available in v2.
The free tier only allows writing tweets (posting, deleting, liking) u2014 it does not include reading tweets, user data, or search. For any read functionality, the Basic plan ($100/month) is the minimum. This effectively ended free access for analytics, monitoring, and research applications that were previously free.
In the old Twitter API, Elevated access was a separate application tier. In API v2, access tiers are purely billing-based u2014 Basic, Pro, or Enterprise. No application or approval is needed beyond account creation and adding a credit card. However, X reserves the right to review applications for compliance with its developer agreement.