X's API Pricing Killed My Project — Here's What I Use Instead

In early 2023, Elon Musk ended free access to Twitter's API. Overnight, thousands of developers, researchers, and hobbyists who had built tools on top of it were handed a bill they couldn't pay.

The new pricing tiers: $100/month for Basic (with severe rate limits), $5,000/month for Pro. Enterprise pricing is available on request — which, for most people, is a polite way of saying "not for you."

If you had a side project, a research tool, or a small SaaS built on Twitter data, you had a few options: pay up, pivot, or shut it down.

Most people shut it down.

What Actually Broke

The free tier had been generous enough to support a whole ecosystem of indie tools. Social analytics dashboards. Automated newsletters curating tweets from specific accounts. Academic research scrapers. Sentiment monitors. Thread readers. All of it ran on a simple, well-documented API that cost nothing to access.

The moment that changed, the math stopped working. At $100/month for Basic access, you'd need to charge real money to real users just to break even on API costs alone — before hosting, before your time, before anything else. For solo developers and researchers, that's not a business model, it's a barrier.

The crueler part is that the data itself didn't change. The tweets are still there. The conversations are still happening. The only thing that changed is who gets to access them programmatically, and at what price.

The Workaround That Actually Works

Our Cheap & Simple Twitter/X API is an Apify actor that wraps Twitter's API endpoints and exposes them at pay-per-use pricing — no monthly subscription, no seat fees, no rate-limit roulette.

The cost: as low as $0.00046 per tweet on paid Apify tiers. For comparison, X's Basic plan at $100/month gives you 10,000 tweets/month — that's $0.01 per tweet. This actor is roughly 20x cheaper at scale.

And unlike the raw Twitter API, which returns deeply nested, noisy JSON objects full of fields you'll never use, this actor returns clean, flattened tweet and user objects. No preprocessing pipeline needed. You get exactly what you need:

{
  "type": "tweet",
  "id": "1920130001699062027",
  "text": "Just announced: our new telescope images are live.",
  "likeCount": 48200,
  "retweetCount": 9100,
  "replyCount": 1340,
  "viewCount": 2100000,
  "createdAt": "2026-04-18T14:22:00Z",
  "author": {
    "userName": "NASA",
    "followers": 8200000,
    "isBlueVerified": true
  }
}

No data.data.data.attributes. No null-checking 15 nested fields to get to the text. Just the tweet.

What You Can Build With It

The actor supports the endpoints that actually matter for most projects:

• tweet/advanced_search — search any query across all of Twitter, with Latest or Top sorting
• user/last_tweets — pull recent tweets from any account
• user/mentions — get tweets mentioning a specific user
• tweet/replies and tweet/quotes — map full conversation threads
• user/followers and user/followings — analyze account networks
• list/tweets — pull tweets from curated Twitter lists

Pagination is handled via a cursor parameter across all list endpoints, so bulk pulls work cleanly without hitting walls.

The Pricing Comparison in Plain Numbers

Say you want to pull 50,000 tweets per month for a social analytics tool.

That's not a marginal improvement. It's a different category of accessible.

Getting Started

1. Create a free Apify account
2. Open the Cheap & Simple Twitter/X API
3. Pick an endpoint and pass your parameters — that's the entire setup
4. Call it via the Apify UI, the REST API, or any of the SDK integrations (Zapier, Make, n8n)

No OAuth dance. No developer app approval. No waiting for X to grant access to your use case. You enter an endpoint name and some parameters, and you get data back.

The Twitter API didn't get worse as a data source when X raised prices. The conversations, the trends, the public discourse — all of it is still there. What changed is the price of admission. This actor brings that price back down to something that makes sense for the projects most people actually want to build.