X API Pricing is Now Only Usage Based, No Fixed Plans
X has updated its API pricing and shifted from fixed plans to usage-based pricing, which increases costs for heavy users. Below is a screenshot of the updated X Developer Console.
Under the old subscription model, the Basic plan cost $200/month and allowed up to 15,000 post reads, 50,000 user lookups, and 75,000 DM requests per user per month. The Pro plan cost $5,000/month and allowed up to 1 million post reads, 8 million user requests, and 300,000+ DM requests. Once you paid the fixed fee, the cost of additional usage within the limit was $0. There was also a free plan that supported 100 post reads and 500 writes per month.
The same Basic-level usage under the new usage-based pricing model would cost approximately:
- 15,000 post reads → $75
- 50,000 user reads → $500
- 75,000 DM reads → $750
Total = $1,325/month for what previously cost $200/month.
That is a 562% increase.
At the old Pro tier, you paid $5,000/month for up to 1,000,000 post reads. Under usage pricing, 1,000,000 post reads now cost $5,000 alone (1,000,000 × $0.005). That means post reads alone now consume the entire old Pro subscription, before counting users, DMs, writes, or interactions. If you also add:
- 1,000,000 user reads → $10,000
- 300,000 DM reads → $3,000
Your monthly bill becomes $18,000+, compared to the old $5,000 flat. That is a 3.6× increase for the same workload.
The new usage-based pricing model favors very low API users. If you only read 1,000 posts per month, that costs $5 instead of paying $200 for the Basic plan. If you read 5,000 users per month, that costs $50 instead of needing Pro. For hobby apps, prototypes, or internal tools with low traffic, usage pricing will be cheaper. But once you cross roughly 40,000–50,000 combined actions per month, the new model becomes more expensive than the old Basic plan, and once you reach production scale, it becomes multiple times more expensive than Pro. Usage-based pricing also has no free plan.
We will continue monitoring X API pricing and update it on the X API Pricing History page.
Info: Although the developer dashboard (at developer.x.com) still allows existing users to subscribe to fixed pricing, X has updated its pricing documentation and removed fixed pricing plans. It appears to be only a matter of days before all users are transitioned entirely to usage-based pricing on console.x.com.