X API pricing in 2026, and what monitoring really costs

Current X API rates

New developer accounts on X pay per resource instead of a fixed monthly tier. The rates that matter for monitoring and replying, as published in X's developer documentation:

There's no free tier for new sign-ups. You prepay credits with a card, and X has offered starter credits to new accounts. Check the pricing page in the X developer console before budgeting, because rates and caps change.

How much does monitoring cost?

You're billed for each post X returns. Two inputs decide the bill: how many accounts you watch and how often they post, and how many posts your keyword searches match. Asking only for posts newer than the last check keeps you from paying twice for the same post.

Five ways to keep your X bill low

1. Read only new posts. Use a start time equal to your last check. Upfront does this on every scan.
2. Combine keywords. One search with several OR'd phrases costs the same per post as separate searches and saves calls.
3. Skip replies and reposts when reading accounts' timelines. They rarely need an answer from you.
4. Avoid user lookups on every post. They cost twice as much as reading a post. Look up watched accounts once and cache the IDs.
5. Set a daily cap. Upfront stops reading at your cap, 300 posts a day by default.

How to get an X API Bearer Token

1. Go to developer.x.com and sign in with any X account.
2. Accept the developer terms and describe your use case, for example "Monitoring public posts about my product category to reply manually."
3. Add a payment method and buy a small amount of credit.
4. Open your project's app, go to Keys and tokens, and generate the Bearer Token.
5. Paste it into the Upfront bot. The bot checks it, stores it encrypted and deletes your message.

Copy the token exactly as X shows it. It may contain characters like %3D, and those are part of the token.