Rate Limits
Rate limiting is per-account, measured in requests per second (QPS). The ceiling depends only on whether you have ever bought credits, plus a small bump for the two highest subscription tiers.
There is no monthly cap and no daily cap — you can burn through any number of credits per month as long as you stay under the per-second ceiling.
Stream (account monitoring) subscriptions are separate from the REST API. A stream plan does not include API credits or a higher REST rate limit: REST calls are paid with credits, and until you've purchased credits, your account stays at the free-tier limit of one request every 5 seconds.
Account state · Rate limit
- 01Brand-new account (never paid)
0.2 req/s — enough to try the API, encourages first top-up.
1 request / 5 seconds - 02Any account that has bought credits at least once
A single one-time credit purchase is enough; no subscription required.
20 req/s - 03Starter · Builder · Pro subscriptions
These plans compete on credits, bonus, and credit return, not on throughput. Need more sustained QPS? See Scale and Business below.
20 req/s - 04Scale subscription50 req/s
- 05Business subscription500 req/s
- 06Larger needs
Email contact@twitterapi.io with your use case and expected sustained req/s.
On request
See /subscribe — Starter, Builder, and Pro differ in credit grant, recharge bonus percent, and rolling credit return. If you need throughput above 20 req/s on a sustained basis, Scale (50 req/s) and Business (500 req/s) are the tiers where the ceiling goes up.
Hitting the ceiling returns an HTTP 429 (no Retry-After header is sent). Wait about a second and retry with exponential backoff — we don't block the account.