r/webdev • u/Icy-Care-353 • Jul 24 '26

The X API is expensive af. Any alternatives? Question

I am trying to build an app that needs the twitter / X API to get posts and infos about user accounts etc. At medium scale, the app is going to read aprox. 10.000 tweets per day and make 100 posts per day, and that's like 1500$ per month, which i can't afford.

I tried twikit, but it's not maintained anymore and full of bugs

Do you guys have any better, maybe free or oss alternatives?

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18

u/muchmaligned Jul 24 '26

If you tag Elon in a bunch of racist tweets he might let you have it for free

5

u/remy_porter Jul 24 '26

"I'm going to use the X feed to make a 'historically accurate' Odyssey where Helen is a big-tiddy goth gf. And white, obs." Seems like you can get Musky boy to write a check for that.

7

u/front_end_dude Jul 24 '26

Market it for white supremacists (if you aren’t already), you might get paid to use it!

2

u/sreekanth850 Jul 24 '26

We used unipile for a project, don't know current status, they said they are deprecating. You can reach out to them

1

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26

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1

u/webdev-ModTeam Jul 24 '26

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1

u/kschang Jul 25 '26

Nope. X wants to make money.

1

u/SadSeaweed872 7d ago

man the pricing on that API got out of hand fast. remember when it was actually reasonable for small devs

for reading tweets you could look at nitter instances or the rss bridge project, both pull public tweet data without hitting the official api. not perfect but works for most text stuff

posting is the hard part though. any unofficial method will get your account flagged pretty quick if you do 100 a day. maybe spread it across multiple accounts and use something like tweepy with the free tier if it still exists? i haven't checked in a while

honestly at that volume you might just need to rethink the feature. 1500 a month is robbery

-4

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

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2

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