Upload-Post Alternative for Twitter (X): Post, Read and Search From One API

Upload-Post describes itself as a unified social media API that posts to 22 platforms with one call: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Threads, Pinterest, Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, Telegram, Google Business Profile and a long tail that includes Mastodon, WordPress and Dev.to (upload-post.com/llms-full.txt). Its main endpoints are POST https://api.upload-post.com/api/upload for video, /api/upload_photos for images and carousels and /api/upload_text for text-only posts, authenticated with an Authorization: Apikey header. It offers Python and JavaScript SDKs, an n8n community node, a Make module, Zapier and an open-source MCP server for AI agents.

Posting on X. Its docs say it posts to X through its own X API access, so you connect the X account once in its dashboard and do not buy an X API tier. Text longer than 280 characters is split into a thread automatically unless you set x_long_text_as_post=true; video, photos, replies, Communities and scheduling are supported (docs.upload-post.com/llm.txt).

Reading on X. The read side is scoped to accounts you have connected. The Analytics API returns profile and post metrics for your profiles, the Media List endpoint returns recent posts from a connected account (up to 100 per page on X), and the Comments API lists comments on your posts, which on X it builds from mentions (source: "mentions"), with hide not available. We found no endpoint in its documentation for searching public X posts, reading another account's timeline, or listing someone else's followers.

Two X-specific caveats in its own docs. First, every URL is stripped from X posts by default, because X bills $0.200 for a post that contains a URL versus $0.015 without one; to keep links you add the X Links add-on. Second, its docs warn that a reply can return HTTP 403 on X's pay-per-use tier when the posting account has not engaged with the author, and that reconnecting does not fix it.

Where it fits. If the job is one asset published to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X at once, that is exactly what Upload-Post is built for, and it remains a fit for that part of the job. The rest of this page is about the X half: what the posts look like, what reading them back costs, and what you can do when you need X data beyond your own accounts.

Upload-Post prices by profile, not by call. A profile connects one account per platform (five profiles means five X accounts, five TikTok accounts and so on), and every paid plan includes unlimited uploads. Annual billing lowers the monthly price (Basic drops from $24 to $16). These are the published USD prices (upload-post.com/pricing and upload-post.com/llms-full.txt):

Add-ons that touch X. The X Links add-on is $19 a month, monthly billing only, and includes 50 link-posts a month counted globally per account: the pool is shared across all of your X profiles, not per profile. When the 50 are used, URLs are stripped again until the next billing cycle (docs.upload-post.com/guides/x-links-addon). Extra-profile add-ons run from $15 a month for five more profiles on Basic.

What the plans do not include. None of the plans adds public X search or reading accounts you do not own; those features are absent from the pricing page and the API reference, so the plan you pick buys posting capacity and owned-account analytics, not X data.

A posting API is priced and limited around an imagined workload of a few scheduled posts a day. Real organization accounts look different. We read the recent timelines of 13 organization accounts with replies included, 1,458 posts in all, and classified every post as an original, a thread continuation (a reply to the account's own post), a reply to someone else, a quote or a repost.

Only 39% of the sample were standalone originals. Replies to other people were 28%, thread continuations 16%, reposts 12% and quotes 5%. The accounts started 132 threads in the sample window. In other words, close to half of what these brands create on X (44%) is conversation: answering customers, continuing a thread, replying to a partner.

The spread between accounts is wide. Netflix created about 10.9 posts a day, almost all originals with media (100% of its own posts carried media, 72% video) and almost no links. Adobe's sampled posts were 91% replies to other people. GitHub and n8n linked out in 64% and 65% of their own posts; Netflix in 1%. A posting tool that treats every account as a calendar of originals misses most of this.

Why this matters for Upload-Post buyers. Two of the measured habits run into Upload-Post's documented X behavior. Links: a third of own posts carried one, and links are stripped unless you buy the add-on. Replies: more than a quarter of all posts were replies to others, and Upload-Post's docs warn those can be refused with HTTP 403 when the account has not engaged with the author on X's pay-per-use tier. Long posts: 16% of own posts ran past 280 characters (a count that includes shortened links), which Upload-Post turns into a thread by default.

Scale each account's measured rate to a 30-day month and count the created posts (originals, quotes, thread continuations and replies) that carry a link. The 13 accounts together would publish about 1,558 posts a month, of which about 229 contain a URL.

Upload-Post's X Links add-on includes 50 link-posts a month for the whole subscription. GitHub alone would use about 45 of them and NASA about 39; the two together are already past the pool. A social team running five or six brand accounts like these would see URLs removed from its X posts for most of the month, then restored when the cycle resets. That is the documented behavior, not a bug: their docs state that after the 50, behavior reverts to stripping.

The reason Upload-Post strips links is X's own pricing: on the pay-per-usage card a post with a URL costs $0.200 against $0.015 without (docs.x.com/x-api/getting-started/pricing). A tool that posts through the official API carries that cost. TwitterAPI.io's create_tweet_v2 posts through an authenticated session of your account instead, so a post with a link is billed like any other call: $0.002.

Totals: 1,558 posts, $66.04 a month on X's post-creation card versus $3.12 at $0.002 per call, plus a one-time $0.10 login per account ($1.30 for all 13). Upload-Post's own plans are priced per profile rather than per post, so they are not in this table; for these 13 X accounts its profile count alone points to the Professional plan (25 profiles), before the links add-on.

Each row below is sourced: Upload-Post from its pricing page and API documentation, TwitterAPI.io from docs.twitterapi.io, X from docs.x.com. Where Upload-Post's docs are silent, the cell says so instead of guessing.

Reading compared with the official X API. For the read half, the reference price is X's own pay-per-usage card: $0.005 per post read, $0.010 per user read and $0.010 per follower or following read, capped at 3 million post reads a month before Enterprise, with $20 of credits on a first card purchase and an auto-recharge match up to $50. TwitterAPI.io charges 15 credits per tweet returned, $0.15 per 1,000 tweets, against X's $5.00 per 1,000 posts: about 33x less on that rate card. Profiles are $0.18 per 1,000. Reads need only an API key, no X account.

The one-line decision. If you publish the same assets to many networks and only need your own analytics, a multi-platform posting API like Upload-Post covers it. If X is where your customers talk, and you need to see the conversation (search, mentions, competitors' posts, keyword alerts) as well as post into it, an X data API is the better tool, and posting comes with it.

After a post goes out, teams want three things back: its numbers (likes, reposts, replies, views), the replies and mentions it generated, and how it compares with peers. Upload-Post gives you the first for your own posts and a mentions-based comments list. TwitterAPI.io gives you all three for any public post.

What reading back costs. Re-reading every post the 13 accounts would create in a month once costs about $0.23 at $0.15 per 1,000 tweets, against about $7.81 at X's $0.005 per post read. Pull 100 IDs per /twitter/tweets call and you pay per tweet returned; an empty search is billed the 15-credit minimum, $0.00015, and a full 20-tweet timeline page is $0.003.

What the numbers look like. The median original post in our sample collected 121 likes, 14 reposts, 18 replies and 31,319 views. Those are brand accounts with large audiences; the point is that every field (likeCount, retweetCount, replyCount, quoteCount, viewCount, bookmarkCount) comes back on the same tweet object you get from search or a timeline, so a benchmark against a competitor's last 100 posts is five timeline pages, $0.015.

Replies and mentions. /twitter/user/mentions returns posts that mention an account (top-level tweets[], has_next_page, next_cursor), and the replies endpoints return the conversation under one post. That is the input to a support queue or a reply bot; the replies you then post go through create_tweet_v2 with reply_to_tweet_id.

Many Upload-Post users arrive from n8n, where its community node is the quick way to post. The same job on X takes two HTTP Request nodes against TwitterAPI.io: a one-time login and a create-post call. n8n's HTTP Request node supports a generic Header Auth credential, so the API key lives in one credential named X-API-Key rather than in each node (docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/core-nodes/n8n-nodes-base.httprequest/).

Step 1: log in once. POST /twitter/user_login_v2 with user_name, email, password, proxy and, strongly recommended, totp_secret (the base32 2FA seed, not a six-digit code). The docs say to use a high-quality residential proxy that you supply, formatted http://user:pass@ip:port, and that an account without 2FA may get cookies that are flagged and cannot post. The call costs $0.10 and returns login_cookies, which only the _v2 write endpoints accept. Run it from a manual-trigger workflow and store the cookies in an n8n environment variable or credential, never in the workflow JSON.

Step 2: post. A Schedule Trigger (or a Google Sheets or Airtable trigger) feeds one row per run into an HTTP Request node that POSTs to /twitter/create_tweet_v2 with login_cookies, tweet_text and proxy. Optional fields: reply_to_tweet_id for replies and threads, media_ids for media uploaded first with /twitter/upload_media_v2, community_id, and is_note_tweet for long posts. The response carries status and tweet_id; an If node routes status = success to a write-back step that marks the row posted and stores the ID.

Step 3: threads. Post the first part, take tweet_id from the response, and pass it as reply_to_tweet_id on the next part. In n8n that is a Loop Over Items node around the HTTP Request node with a Wait node between iterations.

Write-action caveats, all of them. Every write call acts as that X account, so X can rate-limit, lock or suspend it if it behaves like a bot: keep a human pace (no bursts, spaced posts, no identical text across accounts). The session can expire and need a fresh login; treat a failed post as a signal to re-run Step 1 rather than retrying in a loop. Write calls are $0.002 each and billed per HTTP 200 response, so a post that X refuses inside a 200 is still billed; check status and stop on repeated refusals. Reading never needs any of this: search, timelines and mentions use only the API key.

Set the node to POST, Authentication to Generic Credential Type, Header Auth, Body Content Type JSON. The body is below; the expressions read secrets from n8n environment variables. The proxy value is an example address from the documentation range, replace it with your own.

Choosing the proxy. The same proxy should be used for the login and for later posts from that account, so the account's sessions look consistent. Free proxies are explicitly discouraged in the endpoint docs.

Keeping cookies fresh. The docs say cookies from an account in good standing used through residential proxies generally remain valid; in practice, a scheduled workflow should treat any non-success status on create_tweet_v2 as a reason to alert a human, not to log in again automatically every run.

Question. What does a real X posting workload look like for organization accounts, and what would it cost to post it and read the engagement back on each rate card?

Accounts. @Shopify, @canva, @NotionHQ, @figma, @Spotify, @netflix, @NASA, @duolingo, @Adobe, @HubSpot, @zapier, @n8n_io, @github: public organization accounts only, chosen as brands with active X teams across media, consumer apps, developer tools and automation.

Method and window. /twitter/user/last_tweets with includeReplies=true, newest first, up to six pages (about 120 posts) per account; the window per account runs from its oldest to newest sampled post, from about a week (Netflix, NASA) to many months for accounts that post rarely (HubSpot). 1,458 posts in all, 74 requests, about $0.22 of reads, collected in 2026. Monthly figures are each account's measured posts per day times 30.

Definitions. Thread continuation: a reply to the account's own post. Link: a URL whose host is not x.com, twitter.com or t.co. Text length counts characters in the returned text, including shortened links, so the over-280 share is an approximation.

What the sample cannot show. It reflects recent weeks for busy accounts and longer spans for quiet ones, so seasonal campaigns can skew a rate. NASA's timeline returned only 20 posts with replies included, so its rates rest on a small sample. The cost columns assume every created post is published through the API, which most brands do through a mix of tools. Engagement medians describe these large accounts, not a typical account.

Privacy. Aggregates only. Replied-to users are counted, never named or analyzed. Raw pages are kept only for the organization accounts; the study files are data/studies/upload-post-alternative/ in our repository.