Twitter / X API Rate Limit Calculator
Plug in your daily volumes. The calculator tells you when you'll hit X's 3,000,000 monthly Post-reads cap, projects your monthly X bill at the per-resource rates, and compares it against a pay-per-call API with no monthly cap.
Your monthly X API cost
$0.005 per Post read. At this rate you'll consume 10% of the 3M monthly pay-per-use Post-reads cap
$0.010 per resource — 2× the Post rate
$0.001 per resource — 1/5 the standard Post rate
$0.015 per post
$0.200 per post — 13× a plain post
How the 3M Post-reads cap actually works
X bills the API pay-per-usage, with no subscriptions. Every Post read costs $0.005 from the first one, so the bill grows linearly: 100K Post reads is $500, 1M is $5,000. The limit is the cap: pay-per-usage stops at 3,000,000 Post reads per monthly billing cycle. A job that fetches 2.9M Posts in a month costs $14,500; the same job at 5M Posts cannot run on pay-per-usage at all and has to move to Enterprise, which X offers through an interest form with no public price.
Other resource families bill per call too. User reads, DM-event reads, follower / following reads and Trends reads bill at $0.010 per resource — double the Post rate. Post creation is $0.015 per plain post but jumps to $0.200 per post that includes a URL — a 13× premium that catches teams who haven't modelled it. The one win on the X side is Owned Reads: calls your developer app makes against its own account's data are billed at $0.001 per resource — one-fifth of the standard rate.
Why the cap matters more than the per-read rate
The $0.005 rate looks small until you multiply it. A 2-million-reads-per-month workload costs $10,000 on X (2M × $0.005) and roughly $300 on TwitterAPI.io at $0.15 per 1,000 tweets. That's a ~33× gap on raw Post reads; it widens further when User reads or URL-bearing Posts are in the mix. Past 3M reads a month the comparison stops being about price: X's pay-per-usage billing no longer serves the workload.
What this calculator does not model
Two real costs sit outside the slider math. Per-window rate limits are independent of the monthly cap — X sets per-endpoint limits in 15-minute windows (see docs.x.com), regardless of your spend. Long-running jobs that respect the monthly cap can still hit per- endpoint per-window 429s; budget exponential backoff into the client. 24-hour deduplication on X works in your favour the other way: if the same Post is returned from multiple queries within the same UTC day, X counts it once for billing, so cache-heavy workloads consume less of the 3M cap than naive arithmetic suggests. The calculator is intentionally naive on these two — it gives you the ceiling, not the average.
FAQ
What is the X API monthly Post-reads cap?+
X bills the API pay-per-usage, with no subscriptions. Every Post read costs $0.005, and pay-per-usage is capped at 3,000,000 Post reads per monthly billing cycle (3M reads = $15,000). Above the cap you need Enterprise, which X offers through an interest form with no public price.
How accurate are the rates in this calculator?+
The per-resource rates ($0.005 / $0.010 / $0.001 / $0.200) and the 3M cap are sourced directly from docs.x.com/x-api/getting-started/pricing and docs.x.com/x-api/fundamentals/post-cap. X publishes 'Prices are subject to change' so verify against the Developer Console before purchase. The calculator math is straightforward arithmetic.
Does TwitterAPI.io have its own rate limit?+
Yes, per second rather than per 15-minute window: 0.2 requests/s (one every 5 seconds) before your first payment, 20 requests/s once you've paid (any top-up or plan), 50 on Scale and 500 on Business, up to 1,000 on request. Exceeding it returns HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header. Billing is $0.15 per 1,000 tweets with no 3M monthly Post-reads cap, so cost scales linearly with what you pull.
Why is post-creation with a URL so expensive on X?+
X charges $0.200 per Post creation that includes a URL — 13× the $0.015 rate for a plain Post and 40× the $0.005 Post read rate. The premium reflects the operational cost X attributes to URL handling (preview rendering, safe-browsing check, t.co rewrite). Programmatic post creators should price this in.
What's an Owned Read?+
Owned Reads are calls your own developer app makes against your own account's data — for example, fetching the followers list of an account that is owned by the same X identity that owns the developer app. They are billed at $0.001 per resource (1,000 for $1), one-fifth of the standard $0.005 Post read rate.