For collecting posts at volume, start with the API: it is the route X documents and sells for that job. Billing is pay-per-use with no subscription. Reading a post costs half a US cent per post returned, the same post fetched twice in one UTC day is normally charged once, and pay-per-use accounts stop at three million post reads per monthly billing cycle. Recent search covers the last seven days for every developer, while the full archive back to 2006 needs pay-per-use or Enterprise.
X’s Terms of Service, in the version effective 9 October 2026, state the other side plainly: “crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited”. The same Terms name a fixed damages amount per million posts for anyone who, while in breach of them, requests, views or accesses more than a million posts in a 24-hour period. X’s automation rules add that non-API automation, such as scripting the website, can end in permanent suspension of the account. A rotating proxy changes which address each request leaves from. It does not change what those documents say about the request, and we do not rule on it for you — X’s terms and our Acceptable Use Policy both apply.
If you still check X’s public pages directly — a handful of public profiles and posts looked at from several countries — the rotating pool is the right shape of network for that. Search, Explore and hashtag pages send logged-out visitors to the login page, so they are an account’s job, not the pool’s. X withholds some posts and accounts in specific countries and decides which country you are in from the location information it receives, so what a visitor sees can differ by market. Each request can leave from a different mobile address, the country is set in the username, and a sticky session holds one address for 1 to 120 minutes when a check spans several pages. Never sign an account in through the pool: its addresses are shared with other customers by design.
Which route costs less depends on your tool. The API bills per post; the pool bills per gigabyte, and the bytes one check uses depend on what your tool loads — media, scripts, retries. Run a day of checks on the 1 GB pack before you buy the 100 GB one.
FROM X’S OWN PAGES
“The X API uses pay-per-usage pricing. No subscriptions—pay only for what you use.”
“Pay-per-usage plans are capped at 3 million Post reads per monthly billing cycle.”
“crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited”
“We use information that we may receive about your location to determine your country.”
# rotating pool: __cr.us pins the exit to the United States; swap in another code from the country list in your dashboard — host, port and credentials are there too
curl -x "http://user__cr.us:pass@GATEWAY_HOST:PORT" https://proxeasy.net/api/ip
Sources, read 11 October 2026: X API docs — Search Posts · X Help Center — Automation rules · Prox’Easy Acceptable Use Policy