Scraping the X (Twitter) API in 2026 means choosing between brutal official pricing, risky login scrapers, or compliant public-only data.
Enterprise tiers price out most builders. Third-party APIs and public profile endpoints fill the gap—with different stability tradeoffs.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- Login scraping: powerful but risky
- Public-only data: compliant but limited
- Recent tweets via Google search
- How to pick a path
We’ll break down each approach below.
Option 1: Scraping Behind the Login (Powerful but Risky)
This is where all the good stuff lives: full user timelines, Twitter Search, replies, and more.
But here’s the deal: scraping behind the login is against X’s terms of service. It’s risky. Tools that do this could be shut down overnight, just like SocialData.tools was recently.
Still, there’s one standout:
Old Bird V2 on RapidAPI
Old Bird v2 is a third-party API that mimics the old Twitter API and scrapes behind the login.
Pros:
- Read access to user timelines, tweet search, tweet metadata
- Way cheaper than Twitter/X’s official API
- Been around for years and still working as of 2025
Pricing (as of July 2025):
- Pro: $24.99/month → 100k tweets
- Ultra: $69.99/month → 300k tweets
- Mega: $179.99/month → 1M tweets
Cons:
- It scrapes behind the login — which means it could disappear anytime
- No write/post access (read-only)
Verdict: If you want full-featured access at a reasonable price and can accept the risk, Old Bird is your best option today.
Option 2: Scraping Only Public Twitter Data (Compliant but Limited)
Want to stay fully compliant and not worry about takedowns? Then stick to scraping only public data, the kind you can see when not logged in.
BUT:
- You can’t access search
- You can’t see replies
- A user’s profile only shows their top ~100 tweets, not their most recent
Test it yourself: open a profile in an incognito browser and you’ll see what we mean.
If you’re okay with those limits, I’ve made it super easy with my own tool: Scrape Creators. We only scrape public data, so it’s stable and safe.
Here’s an example of how easy it is to get someone’s public profile:
GET https://api.scrapecreators.com/v1/twitter/profile?handle=elonmusk
Bonus Trick: Get Recent Tweets via Google
Google’s search results often show a user’s most recent tweets.
Search for:
twitter austen allred
This will show a block of tweets in the results. Weirdly, if you search for:
austen allred twitter
…it won’t work. 🤷♂️
So the query is a little finicky.
If you want to automate this, I’ve got a Google Search scraper you can use. I’d just need to tweak it to extract tweets from the result block. Email me if you want help with that: adrian@thewebscrapingguy.com
Final Thoughts
There’s no perfect solution to scraping Twitter in 2025, but there are smart options.
- Want full power? Use Old Bird.
- Want safety? Use Scrape Creators.
- Want the most recent tweets? Hack Google or use Old Bird
As long as you stay out of the login wall, you’re golden. But if you go behind it, don’t be surprised if your API provider disappears overnight.
To try Scrape Creators for free sign up here: https://app.scrapecreators.com/
