What this API does and who it is for
The Twitter API aggregates access to Twitter/X data — tweets, user profiles, follower graphs, community structures, trending topics, media, and more — through a single marketplace interface. Rather than dealing with Twitter's own developer portal, credential approval process, and shifting access tiers directly, developers can hit this API and get structured responses for a wide range of social-data needs.
With a popularity score of 9.9 out of 10 and over 9,000 marketplace subscribers, this is among the highest-trafficked APIs in the Social category. It is suited for teams building social listening tools, analytics dashboards, content scheduling products, bot detection systems, community monitoring platforms, and any application that needs to read from or write to Twitter at scale.
Endpoint walkthrough
The API exposes 67 endpoints in total. The 40 documented here span two generations — the legacy v1.1 namespace and the newer v2 namespace — as well as unversioned endpoints that appear to correspond to earlier v1 behavior. Understanding which version an endpoint belongs to matters for response shape and data richness.
Read endpoints
Tweet retrieval is covered by /v2/TweetDetail/, /TweetDetail/, and /v2/Tweet/, letting you pull a tweet and its conversation thread. /v2/UserTweets/ returns a user's tweet timeline, and /v2/UserTweetsAndReplies/ includes replies in that stream.
User lookup comes in several flavors: by screen name (/v2/UserByScreenName/, /UserByScreenName/), by numeric REST ID (/v2/UserByRestId/, /UserByRestId/), and a batch variant (/v2/UsersByRestIds/) for resolving multiple IDs in one call. /v2/UserAbout/ provides an extended profile view, and /v1.1/Users/ covers the legacy path.
Social graph data includes followers (/Followers/), following (/Following/), favoriters (/Favoriters/), retweeters (/Retweeters/, /v2/Retweeters/), and likes (/Likes/). These are useful for building influence graphs or auditing account engagement.
Lists are well-represented: /v2/ListDetails/, /v2/ListTimeline/, /v2/ListMembers/, and /v2/ListSubscribers/ give you the full picture of any public list.
Communities — Twitter/X's group feature — have dedicated coverage via /v2/CommunityDetails/, /v2/CommunityModerators/, /v2/CommunityMembers/, and /v2/CommunityMemberSearch/.
Discovery and metadata endpoints include /Search/ for keyword and hashtag queries, /v1.1/Trends/ for location-based trending topics, /v1.1/Locations/ for resolving trend locations, /v1.1/Hashflags/ for branded hashtag emoji metadata, /AutoComplete/ for search suggestions, and /v1.1/TranslateTweet/ for in-platform translations.
Write endpoints
The API is not read-only. The POST write operations include:
/v1/CreateTweet— publish a new tweet/v1/DeleteTweet— remove a tweet/v1/FavoriteTweet//v1/UnfavoriteTweet— like and unlike/v1/CreateRetweet//v1/DeleteRetweet— retweet and undo/v1/Notifications— access notification data/v1/UpdateProfile— modify profile fields
Write capability makes this API viable for automation workflows, scheduling tools, and engagement bots — though you should verify Twitter/X's own automation policies before building write-heavy applications.
Pricing breakdown
The freemium model has four plans. All plans share a 5 requests-per-second rate limit except MEGA, which doubles that ceiling.
| Plan | Monthly price | Included requests | Rate limit | Overage per request |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 100 | 5 / sec | — |
| PRO | $20 | 10,000 | 5 / sec | $0.0010 |
| ULTRA | $50 | 100,000 | 5 / sec | $0.0010 |
| MEGA | $300 | 1,000,000 | 10 / sec | $0.0010 |
The BASIC plan's 100 monthly requests is genuinely tight — enough for prototyping and testing individual endpoints, but not for any live application. At roughly three requests per day, you will exhaust it quickly if you are polling timelines or running searches.
PRO at $20/month is the realistic entry point for a small production application. Ten thousand requests spread across a month gives you roughly 333 per day, which supports lightweight monitoring or personal projects. Overage is priced at $0.001 per request, so an unexpected spike of 5,000 extra calls costs $5.00.
ULTRA's 100,000 monthly requests (about 3,300 per day) suits small teams running social analytics or moderate-volume crawling. MEGA, marked as the recommended plan, provides one million requests and the only rate-limit increase in the lineup — 10 requests per second instead of 5. At that volume, the effective cost per request drops to $0.0003 before overage.
Practical use cases
- Social listening: Combine
/Search/with/v1.1/Trends/to track brand mentions and trending topics, then use/v2/TweetDetail/to pull full conversation context. - Audience analytics: Use
/Followers/,/Following/, and/v2/UserAbout/to build follower-overlap maps or calculate engagement ratios across accounts. - Content pipelines: Automate tweet creation and deletion with the write endpoints, paired with timeline reads to avoid duplicate content.
- Community research: The community endpoints are relatively rare in third-party APIs; if you are studying Twitter/X Communities for research or moderation tooling, this API offers a ready-made path.
- List-based curation: Pull curated list timelines via
/v2/ListTimeline/to build niche news feeds or topic trackers without managing individual follow graphs.
Limitations and things to check before integrating
Latency: The average response time is 1,818 ms. For a social API, this is on the higher side — acceptable for background jobs and batch processing, but noticeable in synchronous, user-facing flows. Architect accordingly; consider queuing requests and caching responses where freshness requirements allow.
Success rate: A 92% average success rate means roughly 1 in 12 requests fails. Build retry logic with exponential backoff into your client from day one. Surface-level errors could stem from upstream Twitter/X rate limits, authentication edge cases, or deleted content — plan for graceful degradation.
Versioned vs. unversioned endpoints: The mix of /v2/, /v1.1/, and unversioned paths implies that not all endpoints return identical data structures. Review each endpoint's response schema before assuming uniformity across calls.
Write operation risk: Twitter/X has terms of service around automation. Using write endpoints (especially /v1/CreateTweet and /v1/CreateRetweet at volume) without complying with those policies may result in account suspension on the platform side, independent of your API subscription status.
BASIC ceiling: If you onboard users who each need their own authenticated context, 100 total monthly requests at the free tier will not stretch far. Plan for an early upgrade to PRO.
Getting started
Subscribe at the BASIC tier to explore the endpoint surface without committing budget. Use /v2/UserByScreenName/ and /v2/UserTweets/ as your first calls — they return rich structured data and give you a clear sense of response latency in your environment. Once you have validated your integration and estimated your monthly call volume, choose the plan whose included quota most closely matches that estimate; overage at $0.001 per request makes mild over-use manageable, but large-scale overages on PRO can accumulate quickly.
For write-heavy use cases, test /v1/CreateTweet carefully in a staging environment with a test account before pointing it at production credentials.
