X makes its basic API tier more costly, launches annual subscriptions

Elon Musk-owned social network X made changes to its API pricing and limits today and also announced annual plans with a discounted rate.

The company raised the prices of the basic API tier from $100 to $200 and said it would introduce higher limits and new endpoints for this subscription plan.

In a post on X’s developer community portal, the company noted that the number of reads through this API will be increased from 10,000 to 15,000, and developers will get new endpoints like reposts_of_me and communities search.

However, on the API comparison page and plan purchase page, the API limits are the same as before. This is possibly an error, and the company will edit the page (it didn’t respond to our queries).

In the announcement post, X Developer account said that it is also introducing an experimental read API for free tier. The company didn’t reveal that the free tier’s post limits are now reduced from 1,500 to just 500, and read API will only give you 100 requests.

What’s more, the company introduced new annual plans for Basic and Pro API tiers that are cheaper than developers paying a monthly fee. The Basic annual plan costs $2,100 and the Pro annual plan costs $54,000.

Earlier this year, X introduced top-ups last year to get an additional limit on read and post requests with a cap of 10 top-ups for the basic tier and five top-ups for the pro tier. The company is now limiting developers to only two top-ups per month for both tiers.

The social network’s API changes last year effectively killed the third-party consumer tool ecosystem made for X. Developers started concentrating on creating solutions for newer and open networks such as Mastodon and Bluesky.

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