Last updated: September 2026
What happened to the $200 Twitter API tier and what do I use now?
The $200 per month Basic tier was force-migrated to pay-per-use on 1 June 2026, and the migration cannot be reversed. Billing is now a prepaid balance drawn down per call: roughly $0.005 a read, $0.015 a post, and $0.20 for a post containing a link.
The counterintuitive part is that this made plain posting much cheaper and link posting much more expensive. Whether you gained or lost comes down to one question: do your posts contain links?
How it happened
You did not just lose a price, you lost a ceiling
The genuinely useful property of the $200 tier was that it was the maximum. Pay-per-use has no inherent maximum. It has a per-cycle spend cap that you set, and if you never set one, auto-recharge quietly adds $200 whenever the balance falls below $10, up to $400 per cycle. A retry storm on a bad deploy can therefore cost more in a weekend than Basic cost in a month.What $200 buys now
Same money, priced per call. This is the table that decides whether the migration helped you or hurt you.
A plain-text bot that used to need Basic can now run for a couple of dollars. A bot that links to your blog, your product, your changelog or anything else is paying about thirteen times the plain rate on every one of those posts. Full per-call detail is in X API pay-per-use explained.
The three replacements, honestly
- Stay on pay-per-use and set the cap yourself. Correct if you need reads, search, or anything beyond publishing. Set a per-cycle spend cap on day one, and do not leave auto-recharge at the defaults. The failure modes are in does pay-per-use have a spend cap.
- Move publishing to a flat-fee service. Correct if your workload is posting rather than research. The X connection is held for you, there is no developer app and no meter, and the monthly number does not move when a deploy goes wrong.
- Reduce what you send to X at all. The cheapest post is the one that did not need the X API. A mirror of the same content on Bluesky costs nothing, because Bluesky issues no API keys and charges nothing to publish.
That third one is the option people miss. If part of your posting exists to reach an audience rather than specifically to be on X, the Bluesky half of it is free, permanently. What it does not do is replace X, and OpenTweet does not pretend otherwise: it is X-native and goes deep there, with Bluesky as a mirror for posts you are already writing.
What the flat-fee version looks like
One bearer key, one endpoint, no developer app, and no line item that changes with volume. The same request can publish to Bluesky in the same call.
curl -X POST https://opentweet.io/api/v1/posts \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ot_your_key" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"text": "Ship notes: https://example.com/changelog",
"platforms": ["x", "bluesky"],
"publish_now": true
}'
# On pay-per-use that link post is about $0.20 on the X side.
# Here it is inside the subscription, and the Bluesky copy is free.OpenTweet is $11.99 a month on Pro with no per-post fee and no per-link surcharge. The endpoint reference is in the API docs, and the cross-posting parameters are in the cross-posting docs.
7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
Frequently asked questions
What happened to the $200 Twitter API tier?
The $200 per month Basic tier was force-migrated to pay-per-use on 1 June 2026, and the migration cannot be reversed. There is no flat monthly plan to go back to. Billing is now a prepaid balance drawn down per call, at roughly $0.005 a post read, $0.015 a post published, and $0.20 for a post that contains a link.
Is pay-per-use cheaper or more expensive than the old $200?
It depends almost entirely on links. At $0.015 a plain post, $200 would buy about 13,000 posts a month, so a plain-text bot is far cheaper than it used to be. At $0.20 a link post, $200 buys about 1,000, which is 33 a day. Most useful automation links somewhere, so the accounts that were comfortable on Basic are the ones now watching the meter.
Did I lose the spend ceiling when Basic went away?
Yes, and that is the part worth acting on. The flat $200 was a ceiling by construction. What replaced it is a prepaid balance with a per-cycle spend cap you have to set yourself, plus auto-recharge that adds $200 whenever the balance drops below $10, capped at $400 per cycle. Left at the defaults, a runaway job can spend more than Basic ever did.
What replaced the $200 tier for someone who just posts?
Either pay-per-use with a spend cap you set deliberately, or a flat-fee service that holds the X connection for you. OpenTweet is $11.99 a month on Pro with no per-post fee, no per-link surcharge and no X developer account, and it also publishes the same draft to Bluesky, where posting costs nothing.
Can I still get a flat monthly X API bill?
Not from X directly for the Basic workload. The remaining ways to have a predictable number are to set a per-cycle spend cap and treat it as your budget, or to post through a provider that charges a flat subscription and absorbs the metering. Those are different trade-offs, not the same product under a new name.
Does the migration affect the free tier too?
The free tier closed to new API projects on 6 February 2026, before the Basic migration. There is no hobby tier, no trial credit and no free calls. Creating a developer account is still free, but the project has to be enrolled in billing before a write succeeds.
Keep exploring
What the meter charges, where the ceiling went, and the half of your posting that costs nothing.
Is the X API free in 2026?
No. The free tier closed and everything meters. The full timeline and per-call rates.
Does pay-per-use have a spend cap?
Yes, and the defaults can still surprise you. Auto-recharge tops up $200 under $10.
What does cross-posting cost?
The Bluesky half is zero, so your whole bill is the X half. Worked monthly math.
What does an X bot cost a month?
The real number once posting, link posts and reads are added up.
One endpoint for X and Bluesky
A single POST with a platforms array, and the gotcha about leaving it out.
OpenTweet vs the X API
Post, schedule and automate X without a developer account or a metered bill.
A flat number instead of a meter
$11.99 a month, no per-post fee, no per-link surcharge, no X developer account. Bluesky in the same draft at no extra cost.
7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.