Twitter scraper API: tweet views by URL for $0.01, no account, no proxies

Getting tweet stats programmatically used to be the easiest job in social data, and then it became one of the most awkward. The official X API moved behind paid tiers whose entry price is far above what a "check this tweet's numbers" use case can justify. DIY scraping of X is a moving target. And scraper marketplaces wrap the answer in accounts, credits, and actor configuration. If what you need is the numbers on a public post, there is now a simpler shape: a tweet views API where the request itself carries a one cent payment and the response is the JSON you wanted.

The problem with every existing route

Note the honest limitation in the last row. This is a stats endpoint for known post URLs, not a replacement for the official API's search, streaming, or posting surfaces. Within its lane, nothing else is close on cost or integration time.

One request, tweet stats plus author followers

GET /api/v1/x/post accepts a full status URL on x.com or twitter.com, or the numeric tweet ID directly:

import { wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig } from "@x402/fetch";
import { ExactEvmScheme } from "@x402/evm";
import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";

const payFetch = wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig(fetch, {
  schemes: [{
    network: "eip155:8453",
    client: new ExactEvmScheme(privateKeyToAccount(process.env.AGENT_PRIVATE_KEY)),
  }],
});

const res = await payFetch(
  "https://x402.findclout.com/api/v1/x/post?url=" +
    encodeURIComponent("https://x.com/AdamSchefter/status/1812340221459871")
);
console.log(await res.json());

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "x",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-07-19T14:07:02.000Z",
  "url": "https://x.com/AdamSchefter/status/1812340221459871",
  "username": "AdamSchefter",
  "views": 4206113,
  "likes": 38914,
  "comments": 1204,
  "shares": 6821,
  "followers": 10914552
}

Field mapping is deliberately uniform with our other platforms: comments is replies, shares is retweets, and followers is the author's count at fetch time. That uniformity is the point. A cross-platform campaign report treats an X post, a reel, and a TikTok identically, one code path, same envelope, same cent.

Payment is the x402 protocol: your first unpaid request gets an HTTP 402 with exact terms, your client signs a $0.01 USDC authorization on Base, retries, and reads the data. The wallet needs USDC only, no ETH, and there is no account anywhere in the flow. Billing rules are mechanical: 4xx responses are never charged, deleted or protected tweets return a paid explicit not_found, upstream failures are unpaid 502s.

What people build on a $0.01 tweet views API

Virality monitoring. X is where narratives start. Polling a set of tweets every 15 minutes costs $0.96 per tweet per day and gives you real velocity curves instead of screenshots. When a story's numbers go vertical, your systems know before your group chat does.

Campaign and creator verification. Sponsored posts on X get quoted view counts by the account that posted them. An independent read of the same number, timestamped in fetchedAt, is one call. The full workflow across platforms, with delivered CPM math, is the subject of how agents verify influencer campaign results automatically.

Agent research. An AI agent reasoning about public discourse needs numbers, not vibes. Because there is no key and no signup, this endpoint can be handed to Claude or LangChain as a tool and the agent pays per lookup from its own wallet; copy-paste tool definitions are in the agent wallet tutorial.

Engagement quality scoring. Views alone mislead on X, where a post can be widely seen and roundly ignored. Likes per view and retweets per view, both computable from one response, separate reach from resonance. With followers in the same payload, you also catch small accounts massively outperforming their audience, the single best early signal on the platform.

Cost math against the official tiers

Because pricing is per request, the comparison with the official X API is straightforward arithmetic. A team that checks 2,000 tweets a month spends $20 here, with no commitment and no idle-month cost. The same team on an official paid tier pays the full monthly fee whether they look up two tweets or two thousand, and they carry the developer-app overhead besides. The crossover only arrives at sustained, high, predictable volume, which is exactly the profile the official tiers are designed for. Bursty, campaign-shaped, or agent-driven usage sits on the wrong side of that line, and that is most usage we see. There is also a latency-to-first-value difference that does not show up in a price table: the first paid lookup here happens minutes after generating a wallet, while an official API integration starts with an application form.

The billing rules keep the math honest at the edges. The 402 challenge is free, so probing the API costs nothing. Malformed URLs come back as unpaid 400s. A tweet that has been deleted or protected returns a paid, explicit not_found, which is itself information your monitoring wants: sponsored posts that vanish mid-campaign are a signal, not a nuisance.

The x scraper API question, answered in one paragraph

If you searched "x scraper api" or "twitter scraper api" and landed here: you probably do not need a scraper. Scrapers exist to extract data at arbitrary shapes and volumes, and they carry the operational weight that mission implies. If your shape is "stats for a post I can already link to," that weight is pure overhead. Send the cent, take the JSON, and spend your engineering time on whatever you were actually building. The same lookup exists for Instagram and TikTok, the universal /api/v1/post endpoint routes all three by hostname, and why there are no proxies in this picture explains the architecture that makes the price possible. For the view-count angle specifically, including how the official pricing tiers reshaped who can afford tweet data, see tweet view counts by API after the API pricing era.