Follower & Following Pricing Now Up to 93% Cheaper — and a New IDs-Only Endpoint
Pulling lots of followers? Your next bill is about to look very different. We’ve switched/twitter/user/followersand /twitter/user/followingsfrom a flat per-call rate to a tiered model that rewards bulk usage, and shipped a brand-new/twitter/user/followers_idsendpoint that returns just IDs at a fraction of the cost.
TL;DR
- Followers / Following with full profile: pricing now scales with page size — pulling 200 per page is up to 93% cheaper than before.
- New IDs-only endpoint: when you only need numeric IDs, grab up to 5,000 in a single call for ~$0.0225 total.
- No code changes required for existing callers of
/followersand/followings; request and response shapes are unchanged. - Effective immediately for all customers, no contract changes, no minimum spend.
Why we did this
When we looked at usage, follower endpoints were one of the least-called surfaces on the platform. The old flat rate of 15 credits per returned follower made bulk collection painful: pulling everyone’s 10,000 followers cost about 150,000 credits, which discouraged the very workflows the endpoint exists for — competitive analysis, audience research, network mapping, influencer scoring.
So we did the boring-but-right thing: redesigned the pricing to match how the API is actually used. Higher page sizes get a steeper discount, and a brand-new IDs-only endpoint exists for the cases where you don’t need the full profile.
New rates: /twitter/user/followers & /twitter/user/followings
Both endpoints now use the same three-tier model. The price is calculated per-call, based on how many followers (or followings) the response actually contains:
| Returned per call | New rate | Old rate | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 – 99 followers | 3 credits each | 15 credits each | −80% |
| 100 – 199 followers | 2 credits each | 15 credits each | −87% |
| 200 followers (max) | 1 credit each | 15 credits each | −93% |
Reminder: 100,000 credits = $1, so 1 credit = $0.00001. A 200-follower page now costs about $0.002.
New endpoint: /twitter/user/followers_ids
When you don’t need profile fields and just want the raw graph, the new IDs-only endpoint is dramatically cheaper still. It accepts a userName or userId, returns up to 5,000 numeric IDs per call with a standard next_cursor for pagination, and is priced like this:
| Returned IDs per call | Rate | 5,000-ID cost |
|---|---|---|
| 50 – 199 | 2 credits / ID | — |
| 200 – 3,999 | 1 credit / ID | — |
| 4,000 – 5,000 | 0.45 credits / ID | 2,250 credits ≈ $0.0225 |
That’s 5,000 follower IDs for about two cents. When you need profile data later, look up only the IDs you actually care about with the existing batch user endpoints.
A worked example
Say you want to map an influencer’s follower graph — they have 50,000 followers, you want all of them.
- Old way (full profile, 200/page × 250 calls): ≈ 750,000 credits ($7.50)
- New way A (full profile, 200/page × 250 calls): 50,000 credits ($0.50) — same data, 93% off
- New way B (IDs only, 5,000/page × 10 calls): 22,500 credits ($0.225) — IDs only, 97% off
FAQ
Do I need to update my code?
For /followers and /followings, no. Request parameters and response shape are unchanged — only the per-call cost is different. To use the new /followers_ids endpoint, see the API reference for parameters and pagination.
My next invoice will be smaller — is that a bug?
Nope. If you call the follower endpoints in bulk you should see your spend drop. The change is permanent; there’s no time-limited promotional pricing, no auto-revert.
Why are smaller pages still relatively expensive?
Each request costs us the same fixed overhead regardless of how much data it returns. Encouraging larger page sizes is what lets us pass real savings on to you. If you can pull at count=200 instead of count=20, you should.
Is this part of a broader pricing reset?
Not at the moment. Tweet, profile, and search pricing are unchanged. We’re tackling this one surface where the per-call cost was clearly out of step with how the endpoint is used; the rest stays as it is.
Where to next
- Updated pricing page — full rate card with the tiered breakdown.
/twitter/user/followersreference/twitter/user/followingsreference/twitter/user/followers_idsreference — the new IDs-only endpoint.- Changelog — full release history.