What are the X API limits and costs for creating posts?

What X charges to create a post

X's developer documentation describes pay-per-usage pricing. You buy credits in the Developer Console, requests draw them down, and the pricing page says there are no contracts, subscriptions, or minimum spend. This replaced the fixed monthly tiers many older guides still describe, so check the date on anything you read about X API plans.

Writes are charged per request. As of October 2026, the pricing page lists Post: Create at $0.015 per request, Post: Create (with URL) at $0.200 per request, and Post: Create (summoned) at $0.010 per request.

The jump from $0.015 to $0.200 matters if your posts carry links. The page labels the second row "with URL", so check the Developer Console before you budget around it. A day of 10 plain posts at the listed rate comes to $0.15. A day of 10 posts that each carry a URL, at the other listed rate, comes to $2.00.

X says prices are subject to change and points to the Developer Console and the developer.x.com pricing page for current rates.

A rough budget shows the shape. Say you post twice a day on X for a month, 60 posts, with no links: at the listed $0.015 per request that is $0.90 in create fees. If every one of those posts carried a URL at the other listed rate, the same 60 posts would be $12.00. These are arithmetic on the posted prices, not a quote from X, and they leave out reads and any scheduler markup.

Rate limits for creating posts

Cost and rate limits are separate. The rate limits page for POST /2/tweets lists 100 requests per 15 minutes per user and 10,000 requests per 24 hours per app. A per-user limit applies when you call with a user token, and a per-app limit applies to the whole developer app, so a scheduler that serves many accounts shares the app limit across all of them.

Deleting is limited separately: the same page lists DELETE /2/tweets/:id at 50 requests per 15 minutes per user. When you pass a limit, the API returns a 429 error until the window resets, and response headers named x-rate-limit-limit, x-rate-limit-remaining and x-rate-limit-reset tell you where you stand.

For a person posting a few times a day, none of these numbers is close. They matter for a tool that publishes on behalf of hundreds of accounts, which is why you will see schedulers set their own lower caps per account.

One practical note on the app limit: it is shared. If a tool you use serves many accounts under one developer app, a burst from other users can use up the same daily allowance. That is a design problem for the tool's maker, and it is the reason schedulers queue posts instead of firing them all at once.

A worked example with the listed numbers. A scheduler serving 200 accounts that each post 10 times a day sends 2,000 create requests a day, well under the 10,000 per 24 hours app limit. At 1,000 accounts the same habit reaches 10,000, so the tool has to space its posts out across the day.

The account-level cap from May 2026

Rate limits are one ceiling; X also caps accounts themselves. In May 2026, X's Help Center was reported to limit unverified accounts to 50 original posts and 200 replies a day, down from the 2,400 posts the page listed before. Engadget reported the change on May 18, 2026, and accounts with a blue checkmark were not described as capped at 50.

For what is confirmed, what X has not confirmed, and how the cap compares with a sane posting pace, see how many posts you can make on X per day.

What a create request can carry

The create-post reference lists what you can attach. Media: 1 to 4 media IDs, and a post can include up to 4 photos, 1 animated GIF, or 1 video. Polls: 2 to 4 options of 1 to 25 characters each. The reference also lists fields for geotags, community posting, paid-partnership disclosure, and a made_with_ai flag that discloses AI-generated media.

Video length depends on the account, not the API plan. The reference gives 20 minutes and 8 GB for a default account and 125 minutes and 16 GB for an X Premium or verified account. A video over the limit returns a 403.

One item to know: the reference says quote-posting through the API requires an Enterprise plan and is not available on pay-per-use. For the text length, see the X character limit answer.

Reading your own posts back

If you build anything that reads results, the read side has its own price. Posts: Read is $0.005 per resource as of October 2026, and pay-per-usage plans are capped at 3 million Post reads per monthly billing cycle. Reads of your own data through qualifying endpoints, such as your own posts, are priced as Owned Reads at $0.001 per resource.

You can set a spending limit per billing cycle. When it is reached, the pricing page says requests are blocked until the next cycle. For a new project, that setting is the cheapest insurance on the page.

New paying users can earn $20 in free credits after saving an eligible payment card and making a first credit purchase, plus a match of a first auto-recharge up to $50, per the free credits notes on the pricing page.

What this means if you use a scheduler

Most people never call the X API themselves. Buffer, Typefully, Publer, Metricool and Postiz hold the API relationship and absorb or pass on the cost in their own plan prices. Their plan pages, not X's, tell you what you pay. If a scheduler's plan seems cheap for a lot of X posts, it is spreading API costs across plans, which is its business decision to explain.

Ask three questions before you rely on a tool for daily X posting: what its own daily or monthly posting cap is, whether posts with links count differently, and what happens when X returns a 429. For the equivalent Threads numbers, see the Threads posting limits answer.

Where Threadgehog fits

Threadgehog writes the Threads post, writes the X version when you approve it, and sends approved posts to the scheduler you already use: Buffer, Typefully, Publer, Metricool or Postiz. That scheduler holds the X API connection, so the API costs and rate limits above belong to its setup. Threadgehog's own prices are on the pricing page, and the site is in waitlist mode until the Mac app opens.

Questions

Sources

1. X Developer Platform: pay-per-usage pricing (checked 2026-10-17)
2. X Developer Platform: rate limits (checked 2026-10-17)
3. X Developer Platform: create post (checked 2026-10-17)
4. X Developer Platform: usage and billing (checked 2026-10-17)
5. Engadget: X limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day (checked 2026-10-17)
6. Threadgehog pricing and FAQ (checked 2026-10-17)

Related

• What is the character limit on X?
• How many posts can you make on X per day?
• What are the Threads posting limits?
• How do you cross-post between Threads and X?
• How do I schedule Threads posts and have AI write them?