1. How much does the X API charge a bot for follows and reposts?
Say you're building an X bot that searches for posts, reposts the good ones, and follows the people who wrote them.
The first thing you want to know is simple: what does each follow and repost actually cost?
As of September 2026, the X API is mostly pay-as-you-go. X's official pricing page lists User Interaction: Create at $0.015 per request and Posts: Read at $0.005 per resource.[1] So a follow or a repost costs a cent and a half. (This article also shows yen at a fixed rate of ¥155 per dollar, which puts $0.015 at about ¥2.33.)
That sounds like nothing.
But a bot doesn't click once and go home. It clicks every day, dozens of times, and it searches too. Then at the end of the month, all those cents show up together on one bill.
2. There's no flat monthly plan to hide behind: you pay per call
X describes the current API as pay-per-usage. You buy credits in the Developer Console, and every request draws them down. There's no required subscription and no minimum spend.[1]
| Action | Official price | ≈ yen at ¥155/$ |
|---|---|---|
| Read 1 post | $0.005 | ~¥0.78 |
| 1 User Interaction (follow, repost…) | $0.015 | ~¥2.33 |
| Create 1 normal post | $0.015 | ~¥2.33 |
| Create 1 post with a URL | $0.200 | ~¥31 |
For a bot that follows or reposts, the number to budget around is the $0.015 per request for user interactions.[1][2]
Prices can change, though. Check the Developer Console right before you build.[1]
3. 100 actions is cheap. Doing it every day is a different story
100 actions at $0.015 cost $1.50 (about ¥233).
Once, that's nothing.
But run 70 actions a day for 30 days:
70 × 30 × $0.015 = $31.50 a month (≈ ¥4,883).
Yep, you're already at about $30 (roughly ¥5,000) a month.
And that's only the actions. With a pay-per-use API, the real cost isn't "how much per call", it's how many times your loop runs.
4. Add the cost of reading posts and it keeps climbing
A bot usually reads posts before it reacts to them. A post read is $0.005, so 100 reads a day is $0.50 a day, or $15 over 30 days (about ¥2,325).[1]
Counting only the bill, "read 100 posts + 70 follows/reposts every day" comes to:
Reads: $15/month
Interactions: $31.50/month
Total: $46.50/month (≈ ¥7,208)
Push it to 100 reads + 100 reposts + 100 follows every day, and the plain math is:
$3.50 a day → $105 a month (≈ ¥16,275).
Your "little hobby bot" now costs about as much as a new video game every month.
One more thing: if you fetch the same billable resource again within the same UTC day, X deduplicates the charge. But X calls this a "soft guarantee", so it's still smart to save the post IDs you've already fetched and skip them yourself.[1]
5. The sneaky expensive one: posts with a link ($0.20 each)
X's pricing page lists Post: Create (with URL) at $0.200 per request.[1]
That's about 13.3 times a normal $0.015 post (about ¥31 each).
One a day is about $6 a month (≈ ¥930). Ten a day is about $60 a month (≈ ¥9,300).
So if your alert bot posts this every single time:
Anomaly detected! Original post here → URL
that link is quietly walking off with your wallet.
You're saving fractions of a cent on reads while every alert burns 20 cents. Read the pricing page all the way to the bottom.
6. "50 per 15 minutes" is a speed limit, not a target
Under the current rate limits, both creating a repost (POST /2/users/:id/retweets) and creating a follow (POST /2/users/:id/following) are capped at 50 requests per 15 minutes per user.[2]
That's how fast the API will let you go. It is not how much X lets you do.
X's automation rules ban bulk, aggressive, or spammy automated reposting, and bulk, aggressive, or indiscriminate automated following and unfollowing.[3] Accounts also have a technical cap of 400 follows a day, but X says plainly that its separate rules against aggressive following still apply.[4]
So the 70-a-day and 100-a-day figures above are just math for understanding the bill, not a suggestion to auto-follow or auto-repost that much.
"The limit is 50 per 15 minutes, so let's do 50 every 15 minutes" will get your account in trouble before the bill does.
7. For a hobby bot, the best design is fewer paid calls
To cut costs, don't automate everything you can. Keep only the requests that are worth paying for.
- Narrow down the accounts and searches you watch.
- Save the post IDs you've already fetched, so you don't pay to read them again.
- Don't automate follows or reposts unless they're the whole point.
- Post only when something meaningful changes, not on every new item.
- Ask whether every post really needs a link.
- Set a spending limit in the Developer Console.[1]
For analysis or prediction bots, read → decide → post only when something really changed is easier on both your wallet and X's rules.
Tuning your API calls turns out to be the same thing as doing your budget.
8. Bottom line: the X API is cheap to start and expensive to keep busy
Pay-per-use makes small experiments cheaper than a big fixed monthly plan.
But $0.015 changes once it's inside a bot's loop.
1 action: $0.015 (≈ ¥2.3) 70 actions/day: $31.50/month (≈ ¥4,883) Plus 100 reads/day: $46.50/month (≈ ¥7,208) 100 reads + 100 reposts + 100 follows/day: $105/month (≈ ¥16,275)
And a post with a link costs $0.20 (about ¥31) every time.
The question that matters for a hobby bot isn't "can the API do this?"
It's: does this paid request really need to happen every time?
A cent and a half is cheap.
Until thousands of them show up together at the end of the month.
Yen figures use a fixed ¥155 per dollar for comparison only; real exchange rates, taxes, and payment terms vary. Prices can also change, so check the Developer Console before you build.
References (4)
- X API pay-per-usage pricing and credits docs.x.com
- X API Rate Limits docs.x.com
- X Automation Rules help.x.com
- About X limits help.x.com
