Social Media API
X (Twitter) API
Read tweets, profiles, followers, replies, search, and trends as structured JSON — at $0.001 per request, with no $200/month floor and no developer-tier approval.
- Pay-as-you-go from $0.001 — 10,000 reads costs about $10, no monthly minimum
- Tweets, profiles, timelines, followers, search, and trending topics
- No tier subscription, no posting/DM scopes to apply for — read public data and go
$0.05 free credit on sign-up · no credit card · from $0.001/request
One request, structured JSON
1curl -X GET "https://api.tikhub.io/api/v1/twitter/web/fetch_tweet_detail?tweet_id=1234567890123456789" \2 -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"1{2 "code": 200,3 "data": {4 "tweet_id": "1234567890123456789",5 "text": "Sample tweet text",6 "created_at": "2026-06-01T12:00:00Z",7 "favorite_count": 4210,8 "retweet_count": 880,9 "reply_count": 192,10 "quote_count": 64,11 "views": 312000,12 "author": {13 "screen_name": "username",14 "name": "Display Name",15 "followers_count": 128000,16 "verified": true17 }18 }19}Get your API key at user.tikhub.io/dashboard/api — or follow the getting-started guide.
What's in the Twitter/X API
TikHub's Twitter/X API provides public data access at pay-as-you-go pricing: tweet details, user profiles and timelines, follower and following lists, replies, full-text search, and trending topics. A practical alternative when the official API's subscription tiers don't fit your volume or budget.
Twitter Web API
No $200/month floor for reading public data
The official X API's Basic tier starts at $200/month and the read limits are tight; serious volume means the $5,000 Pro tier. If all you need is to read public tweets, profiles, and search, TikHub is pay-as-you-go from $0.001 per request with no monthly minimum — 10,000 reads is about $10. It's read-only by design, which is exactly what monitoring, research, and agent use cases need.
TikHub vs the Official X API
| Official X API | TikHub Twitter/X API | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Basic $200/mo, Pro $5,000/mo, Enterprise $42,000+/mo | $0.001/request — 10,000 requests ≈ $10, no monthly minimum |
| Free tier | Write-focused; reads effectively unusable | $0.05 free credit on sign-up, 10 RPS default |
| Posting/DMs | Supported | Read-only public data — by design |
| Getting access | Developer account + tier subscription | Sign up, create an API key |
Official-API details are approximate as of mid-2026 and may change — verify against the Official X API documentation. TikHub provides read-only access to publicly available data.
Twitter/X API endpoints
A reference of the most-used Twitter/X endpoints. Browse the full set in the API reference or the documentation.
Twitter / X Web API
A single, comprehensive series for public X data — tweets, profiles, timelines, search, comments, and trends. All read-only.
Tips & troubleshooting
Hard-won operational notes for working with Twitter/X data in production.
Search operators carry over
The search endpoint accepts the same query syntax you'd type into X search — from:user, since:/until: dates, filter:media, exact-phrase quotes, and boolean OR. That means you can port existing X search queries directly, and build precise monitoring (a brand term excluding retweets, a hashtag within a date window) without extra filtering on your side.
Paginate with cursors, not offsets
Timelines, search, followers, and comments are cursor-paginated: each response includes a cursor you pass to the next call to continue. There's no page-number addressing — keep following the cursor until it's empty. Expect a bounded number of items per page; for a full follower list or a busy search, that's many sequential calls, so budget requests accordingly.
IDs vs handles, and deleted content
Tweets and users have stable numeric IDs and mutable handles; store IDs for anything you track over time. A tweet or account that's been deleted, suspended, or set private will return empty or an error — that's expected, not a fault. For monitoring, treat a sudden empty response as a signal (the content went away) rather than a bug to retry indefinitely.
How does pricing compare to the official X API?
The official X API's Basic tier is $200/month for limited volume; Pro is $5,000/month. TikHub is pay-as-you-go from $0.001/request with no monthly minimum — 10,000 requests costs about $10.
Is using a X (Twitter) API like this legal?
TikHub returns publicly available data — the same content anyone can see without logging in. US courts (hiQ v. LinkedIn) have held that scraping public data is not a CFAA violation. That said, X (Twitter)'s Terms of Service restrict automated access, so account or IP blocks are a real operational risk; TikHub manages that infrastructure for you. You are responsible for how you use, store, and process the data you retrieve.
Can I post tweets or send DMs through this API?
No — TikHub is read-only by design. It returns public data (tweets, profiles, search, trends). For posting or DMs you'd use the official X API.
What are the rate limits?
The default rate limit is 10 requests per second. RPS plans scale it up — 20 RPS at $5/month through 100 RPS at $55/month — and enterprise accounts get custom limits above 100 RPS.
How much does the X API cost?
Pay-as-you-go from $0.001 per request, with automatic daily volume discounts down to $0.0005 at 30,000+ requests/day. New accounts get $0.05 free credit (~50 requests) — no credit card required.
X (Twitter) API: an affordable alternative to the official API in 2026
TikHub's X (Twitter) API lets developers read public X data — tweets, profiles, timelines, search, comments, and trends — at $0.001 per request, with no $200-a-month floor and no tier approval. Here's how it works, how it compares to the official API, where its limits are, and which option fits which job.
How does the X (Twitter) API work?
What is the X API?
The TikHub X (Twitter) API is a RESTful interface that returns structured JSON for public X content — tweets, user profiles and timelines, replies, search results, followers, and trending topics. You request data by tweet ID, username, or search query and receive clean, typed responses without a developer-tier subscription.
It exists because the official X API became expensive: the Basic tier starts at $200/month with tight read limits, and serious volume means the $5,000 Pro tier. If all you need is to read public data, TikHub is pay-as-you-go from $0.001 per request with no monthly minimum.
How do you access and use it?
Create a TikHub account, generate an API key, and make an HTTP GET request with the key in the Authorization header. Identify content by tweet ID, username, or a search query — the search endpoint accepts X's native query operators — and you get JSON back immediately. Results paginate via cursors you pass forward to collect more.
What programming languages are supported?
Any HTTP-capable language — Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Java, PHP, and more — plus no-code platforms. Python is common for monitoring and research pipelines, with an official SDK available, but the API is language-agnostic and drops into any stack with the same request shape.
What are the benefits of using the X API?
How does it compare to the official X API?
On price, the gap is large: the official Basic tier is $200/month for limited reads and Pro is $5,000/month, while TikHub charges $0.001 per request with no minimum — roughly $10 for 10,000 reads. On access, there's no developer-tier application or approval; you sign up and call.
The trade-off is scope: TikHub is read-only by design. You can't post tweets or send DMs through it — for that you'd use the official API. But for monitoring, research, and agent use cases, which are read-heavy, that's exactly the right shape at a fraction of the cost.
What are the time-saving advantages?
You skip the developer-account application and tier subscription entirely, and you avoid rationing reads against a monthly cap. Search supports the operators you already know, so existing queries port over directly. Requests return quickly, making real-time monitoring and large historical pulls equally practical without architecting around a quota.
Who benefits — analysts, developers, or AI teams?
Analysts and brand teams monitor mentions, track narratives, and map influence networks without a five-figure API bill. Developers add X data to dashboards and apps with one key. AI and quant teams feed real-time discourse into agents and trading models, where the read-only, pay-as-you-go model fits the signal-extraction job better than a write-capable enterprise tier.
What are the limitations of the X API?
Can I post tweets or send DMs?
No. The API is read-only by design — it returns public data (tweets, profiles, search, trends, followers) but does not post, reply, like, or message on behalf of an account. If your use case requires writing to X, the official API is the right tool; TikHub complements it for the read side.
Are there rate limits or pagination quirks?
The default is 10 requests per second, scalable with RPS plans. Endpoints are cursor-paginated rather than page-numbered, and each response returns a bounded set of items, so collecting a full follower list or a busy search query takes many sequential calls. Plan request budgets for breadth (many accounts) and depth (long timelines) accordingly.
What about deleted or protected content?
The API only sees public content. Deleted, suspended, or protected tweets and accounts return empty results or errors — which, for monitoring, is itself a meaningful signal that something changed rather than an error to retry. Numeric IDs are stable; handles can change, so key long-term records on IDs.
What are common use cases for the X API?
How is it used for monitoring and research?
Brand and comms teams track mentions and emerging narratives in near real time using search with native operators. Researchers study how information and misinformation spread, sampling timelines and search results over time. The cursor-based pagination supports both broad sweeps across many accounts and deep pulls of a single busy timeline.
How does it power AI and quant signals?
Real-time public discourse is a valued signal source. Quant teams feed tweet streams and engagement metrics into market models; AI teams build retrieval and sentiment pipelines over X content and give agents a live read on what's being said. Structured JSON means the data is model-ready without a scraping step in between.
How is it used for influence and network analysis?
Follower and following lists, retweet user lists, and engagement counts let analysts map who amplifies whom and how reach concentrates around key accounts. Tracking these over time reveals growing voices and coordinated activity — useful for influence measurement, competitive analysis, and integrity research.
Are there alternatives to the X API?
What other X data tools exist?
The official X API is the sanctioned, write-capable option at its tiered pricing. A wave of read-only alternatives (TwitterAPI.io, TweetAPI, TwexAPI and others) offer cheaper pay-as-you-go reads, as do multi-platform providers. Open-source scrapers exist too but carry the usual reliability and infrastructure burden.
Which option is best for different needs?
If you need to post or send DMs, use the official API. If you only need to read public data and want predictable, low pricing, a read-only alternative is a better fit — and a multi-platform provider like TikHub adds the advantage of one key across X plus 15 other platforms, so adding Reddit or Threads later is a one-line change rather than a new vendor.
One key, every platform
The Twitter/X API shares its key and JSON format with 15 other platforms — adding Instagram or Douyin is a one-line change.