Cheap X/Twitter search API alternatives
X's official API is pay-per-use at roughly $0.005 per post read, capped monthly, with the old flat tiers closed to new signups. A search-heavy workload becomes expensive quickly, and anyone reselling at that input cost is underwater. Scraping x.com yourself means reimplementing its request signing and keeping a logged-in session alive.
What people try first
| approach | what happens |
|---|---|
| Official X API | Works and is fully licensed. Price is the problem, not capability. |
| snscrape and friends | Broke when X closed the guest endpoints. |
| Nitter instances | Almost all shut down; the remaining ones are unreliable. |
| Third-party search APIs | Same data at a fraction of the per-post cost. |
The one-call fix
One request, unified JSON, no proxies or parsers to keep alive. 5 credits a call once you are on credits, and free for your first 5.
curl -H "x-api-key: $SS_KEY" \ "https://api.socialsearchapi.com/v1/x/search?query=llm+agents"
Signup is an email and a 6-digit code — no card — and gives you 5 free calls on any platform, so the command above runs as-is.
Real response from that endpoint, captured 2026-07-25:
{
"success": true,
"platform": "x",
"data": {
"total": 20,
"items": [
{
"id": "2080887216629231629",
"platform": "x",
"type": "post",
"text": "@elonmusk @danrobinson Context + prompt injections combined into a portable protocol stack you can force feed to an A...",
"url": "https://x.com/LawtonAver58308/status/2080887216629231629",
"author": "LawtonAver58308",
"author_name": "Avery Lawton",
"created_at": "2026-07-25T05:25:48Z",
"metrics": {
"comments": 0,
"likes": 0,
"quotes": 0,
"reposts": 0,
"views": 14
},
"extra": {
"author_followers": 1303,
"created_at_raw": "Sat Jul 25 05:25:48 +0000 2026",
"lang": "en"
}
}
]
},
"credits_used": 5
}Related
Last verified 2026-07-25. Platform terms and pricing change often — if something here has gone stale, tell us at [email protected].