Twitter / X API Rate Limit Calculator
Plug in your daily volumes. The calculator tells you when you'll hit X's 2,000,000 monthly Post-reads cap, projects your monthly X bill including per-resource overage, and compares it against a pay-per-call API with no fixed-window cap.
Your monthly X API cost
At this rate you'll consume 15% of the 2M monthly 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 2M Post-reads cap actually works
X moved to a hybrid pricing model in February 2026. Every paid tier — Basic ($200/mo), Pro ($5,000/mo), Enterprise ($42,000+/mo) — now shares the same 2,000,000 Post-reads per month cap. Stay under it and you pay the tier's monthly fee; cross it and every additional Post read bills at $0.005 overage on top of the floor. The cap is what makes the bill non-linear: a job that fetches 1.9M Posts in a month costs the tier floor; the same job at 5M Posts costs the floor plus $15,000 in overage.
Three additional resource families bill per-call regardless of which tier you're on. 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 tier name
Headline subscription prices stop telling the truth the moment a workload crosses 2M Post reads. From that point the per-resource overage dominates the bill. A 5-million-reads-per-month workload costs $15,200 on X Basic ($200 + 3M × $0.005), about $20,000 on X Pro ($5,000 + 3M × $0.005), and roughly $750 on TwitterAPI.io at the published pay-per-call rate of ~$0.15 per 1,000 requests. That's a 20–27× gap on raw Post reads; it widens further when User reads or URL-bearing Posts are in the mix.
What this calculator does not model
Two real costs sit outside the slider math. Per-window rate limits are independent of the monthly cap — for example, `/2/tweets` reads are capped at 3,500 / 15 minutes on app auth, regardless of your tier. 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 2M 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?+
Under X's February 2026 hybrid pricing model, every paid tier (Basic, Pro, Enterprise) shares the same 2,000,000 Post-reads/month cap. Once you cross it, every additional Post read bills at $0.005 overage on top of the tier's monthly fee. Free tier has a much tighter ~1,500 posts/month read cap.
How accurate are the rates in this calculator?+
The per-resource rates ($0.005 / $0.010 / $0.001 / $0.200) and the 2M 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?+
Cost is the throttle, not a fixed-window cap. The service is billed per call at about $0.15 per 1,000 requests — usage scales linearly with what you pull rather than bumping into a 2M monthly Post-reads cliff. There is no '429 Too Many Requests' from a fixed window.
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.