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.

Fix: one call, 3 credits
50 free credits on signup, no card
unified JSON, no proxies or parsers to keep alive

1What 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.

2The one-call fix

curl -H "x-api-key: $SS_KEY" \
  "https://api.socialsearchapi.com/v1/x/search?query=cloudflare+workers"

Signup is an email and a 6-digit code, no card. Create a key in the dashboard and your account starts with 50 free credits on any platform, so the command above runs as-is.

Real response from that endpoint, captured 2026-08-27:

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "x",
  "data": {
    "total": 20,
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "2093018344387670335",
        "url": "https://x.com/2zFmeEtqaqoBm9c/status/2093018344387670335",
        "author": "2zFmeEtqaqoBm9c",
        "created_at": "2026-08-27T16:50:34Z",
        "metrics": {
          "comments": 0,
          "likes": 0,
          "views": 14,
          "reposts": 0,
          "quotes": 0
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "credits_used": 5
}

Get a key50 free credits · no card

Verified against a live X / Twitter response on 2026-08-27. Platform terms and pricing change often. If something here has gone stale, tell us at support@socialsearchapi.com.

Cheap X/Twitter search API alternatives

1What people try first

2The one-call fix

3Related