Twitter scraper API & X API alternative guide

Use Xquik as a Twitter API alternative for public reads and automated actions. It works as an X API alternative across REST, SDKs, webhooks, and MCP. The Twitter search API and tweet scraping API search recent and top tweets. The follower scraping API exports follower and following profiles. Use tweet reply scraping for conversations and authors. The Twitter webhook API delivers signed monitor events. You can also post tweets and monitor accounts every second.

Public tweet, profile, follower, reply, timeline, community, and list reads need no connected X account. Every X write requires one. Private reads, including DMs and bookmarks, also require one. See Connect X account.

Choose a Twitter API workflow

Start with the task you need:

Search recent or top tweets by query.
Export tweet replies with author profiles.
Export followers with pagination cursors.
Export following profiles for one account.
Retrieve profiles by username or user ID.
Create account monitors for new tweets and profile changes.
Create keyword monitors for matching tweets.
Send Twitter webhook events to your HTTPS endpoint.

The Twitter scraper API returns tweets, profiles, timelines, communities, lists, and media as structured JSON.

Monitors & events

Create account and keyword monitors, retrieve events, and manage webhooks

Draws & extractions

Run tweet giveaway draws. Extract tweets, replies, profiles, and followers

Tweets, profiles & followers

Search tweets, retrieve profiles, export followers, and download media

X write actions

Post tweets, like, retweet, follow, send DMs, and update profiles

Account & billing

Manage credits, API keys, drafts, styles, and subscriptions

Accountless paid reads

Prepaid guest keys for 33 eligible GET routes

Popular Twitter scraper API tasks

Estimate tweet scraping credits

Quote credits before scraping tweets, followers, replies, profiles, or timelines.

Review Twitter scraping jobs

List past tweet, follower, reply, profile, and timeline extraction jobs.

Check account monitor status

Inspect one Twitter account monitor’s profile, event filters, and active state.

Stop a Twitter account monitor

Delete an account monitor and stop its tweet and profile alerts.

Review Twitter giveaway history

List past tweet giveaway draws with tweet URLs, statuses, and entry counts.

Activate an Xquik subscription

Create a hosted checkout for API access and recurring credits.

Twitter community & audience scraping

Retrieve X community details

Read a community’s rules, member count, creator, moderators, and join policy.

Export X community members

Retrieve community member profiles, usernames, verification, and follower counts.

Export X community moderators

Retrieve moderator profiles, bios, verification, followers, and following.

Scrape X community tweets

Export recent community tweets, authors, replies, reposts, likes, and media.

Search tweets in one community

Filter one community’s tweets by keyword, recency, or top results.

Export a Twitter account's following

Retrieve profiles for every account one Twitter user follows.

Scrape tweet retweeters & repost users

Retrieve profiles for accounts that retweeted or reposted one tweet.

Base URL

https://xquik.com/api/v1

Xquik serves all endpoints over HTTPS only. Always use the full HTTPS base URL.

OpenAPI spec

Xquik publishes the full API specification as an OpenAPI 3.1 document:

https://xquik.com/openapi.json

Xquik also serves YAML at:

https://docs.xquik.com/openapi.yaml

Use either format with OpenAPI tools or client generators. Xquik publishes the spec through RFC 9727 service discovery. Xquik publishes API service discovery at:

https://xquik.com/.well-known/api-catalog

Run in Postman

Fork the official Xquik collection into your Postman workspace. It includes safe starter requests for tweets, users, timelines, and trends.

View the hosted collection documentation.

Authentication

Account API keys can use x-api-key:

x-api-key: xq_your_api_key_here

Generate account keys from the API Keys dashboard. Xquik API keys also support Authorization: Bearer xq_your_api_key_here. OAuth 2.1 Bearer tokens keep their granted account scopes. Accountless guest keys use Authorization: Bearer with the fixed paid_reads scope on 33 eligible routes. A verified payment activates each key. See Authentication.

Machine Payments Protocol

7 fixed-price GET operations accept anonymous MPP payments. The server returns 402 with a WWW-Authenticate: Payment challenge. The response can include a guest wallet action. Complete the MPP challenge or ask the user to confirm a guest wallet. A failed request creates no checkout.

Accountless guest wallets

POST /api/v1/guest-wallets creates a hosted checkout after the user confirms. It returns a guest key and status URL without requiring an account, email, or dashboard. Verified payment activates paid reads for that key. Anonymous requests to 26 non-MPP paid reads return 401 with a Bearer challenge and guest wallet action. The 7 direct MPP reads return 402 with a Payment challenge and the same optional action. Neither response creates checkout. See Accountless guest wallets for creation, polling, top-ups, scope boundaries, and MCP behavior.

First request

Run this request to verify your API key:

curl -s https://xquik.com/api/v1/account \
  -H "x-api-key: xq_your_api_key_here" | jq

Response.

{
  "plan": "active",
  "monitorsAllowed": 9007199254740991,
  "monitorsUsed": 0,
  "monitorBilling": {
    "activeDailyEstimate": "0",
    "activeHourlyBurn": "0",
    "creditsPerActiveMonitorDay": "500",
    "creditsPerActiveMonitorHour": "21",
    "eventsIncluded": true,
    "instantCheckIntervalSeconds": 1,
    "unlimitedSlots": true
  },
  "creditInfo": {
    "balance": "140000",
    "lifetimePurchased": "140000",
    "lifetimeUsed": "0",
    "autoTopupEnabled": false,
    "autoTopupAmountDollars": 10,
    "autoTopupThreshold": "50000"
  }
}

Replace xq_your_api_key_here with your key. After 401, confirm the x-api-key header and xq_ prefix.

Production integration

Use the X API integration checklist before launching a client, workflow, or agent. It covers authentication, pagination, billing, rate limits, and writes that survive retries.

Rate limits

Read requests

The read bucket covers GET, HEAD, and OPTIONS. It allows 300 calls each second. Standard read throttles return Retry-After: 1.

Write requests

POST, PUT, and PATCH share a 120 per 60s user bucket. Throttled writes return Retry-After: 60.

Delete requests

DELETE requests use a separate 60 per 60s user bucket. Throttled deletes return Retry-After: 60.

Exceeding a bucket returns 429 rate_limit_exceeded with Retry-After and a JSON retryAfter field. See the Rate Limits guide for backoff implementations.

Response, error & event contracts

Use these references while building production integrations:

X API integration checklist covers IDs, timestamps, pagination, normalized responses, and monitor events.
Error handling lists error codes and retry actions.
Monitor events documents tweet and profile event filters.
Webhook testing verifies signed deliveries and retries.

Next steps

Error handling

Handle error codes with retries and fallbacks.

Rate limits

Read the limits and add backoff.

Workflows

End-to-end examples: monitors, events, and webhooks.

Tweets, profiles & followers

User lookups, tweet search, trends, and media downloads.

X write actions

Create tweets, likes, retweets, follows, DMs, and profile updates.

Monitors

Check X accounts every second and receive signed webhook events.

​Choose a Twitter API workflow

Monitors & events

Draws & extractions

Tweets, profiles & followers

X write actions

Account & billing

Accountless paid reads

​Popular Twitter scraper API tasks

Estimate tweet scraping credits

Review Twitter scraping jobs

Check account monitor status

Stop a Twitter account monitor

Review Twitter giveaway history

Activate an Xquik subscription

​Twitter community & audience scraping

Retrieve X community details

Export X community members

Export X community moderators

Scrape X community tweets

Search tweets in one community

Export a Twitter account's following

Scrape tweet retweeters & repost users

​Base URL

​OpenAPI spec

​Run in Postman

​Authentication

​Machine Payments Protocol

​Accountless guest wallets

​First request

​Production integration

​Rate limits

Read requests

Write requests

Delete requests

​Response, error & event contracts

​Next steps

Error handling

Rate limits

Workflows

Tweets, profiles & followers

X write actions

Monitors

Choose a Twitter API workflow

Popular Twitter scraper API tasks

Twitter community & audience scraping

Base URL

OpenAPI spec

Run in Postman

Authentication

Machine Payments Protocol

Accountless guest wallets

First request

Production integration

Rate limits

Response, error & event contracts

Next steps