X (formerly Twitter) on any website.

On February 9, 2023 X (then Twitter) ended free API access entirely and launched paid v2 tiers. The current shape of the market: a Free tier that only lets you write posts (no read access at all), a Basic tier at $100 per month for low-volume read access, a Pro tier at $5,000 per month for serious volume, and Enterprise pricing on request. This is the single biggest reason the X widget market shrank: countless free third-party tools that pulled tweets simply stopped working overnight, and most never came back. Today every honest live X widget either pays for X API v2 access itself, has the customer pay, or restricts to oEmbed-only. Poper covers Basic-tier read access on Pro and Business plans so most customers never see the bill, with smart caching that stretches a single tier across many embedded widgets.

There is a quiet exception to the paid-API rule: the publish.twitter.com oEmbed endpoint is still free and unauthenticated. It returns a fully styled HTML embed for any single tweet, quote post or thread head when you give it the post URL. The catch is that it works one post at a time, not as a feed, so you cannot use oEmbed alone to power a live profile or hashtag widget. Poper uses oEmbed automatically when you paste a single tweet or thread URL, so creators who only want to feature one viral post pay zero. The instant you paste a profile handle or hashtag, we switch to the X API v2 path because oEmbed cannot stream a feed.

In April 2023 X removed all legacy verification badges and tied the blue check to the X Premium subscription (formerly Twitter Blue), now starting at around $8 per month per account. As of 2026 verification is mostly a signal that the account holder pays X, not that a third party has confirmed identity. For your widget that has two practical effects. First, you should still render the blue check when X reports it, because removing it would feel inconsistent with what visitors see on x.com. Second, the visual hierarchy of older marketing screenshots that lean on legacy verification is now misleading. Poper renders the current badge state straight from the API response so what shows on your site matches what shows on X today, not what showed in 2022.

Beyond posts and threads, X today is also Spaces (live audio rooms), Communities (Reddit-style topic hubs) and longer-form posts up to 25,000 characters for Premium accounts. The X API v2 surfaces metadata for Spaces (start time, host, scheduled state) and basic post data from Communities, but most legacy widget tools were built for the old 280-character world and ignore both. For news brands and creator-led companies, embedding an upcoming Space card on a content page or pulling Community posts from your own brand-run Community is a meaningful unlock. Poper exposes Space cards and Community feeds on Pro and Business plans so the widget keeps up with what X has actually become.

Beyond pricing and verification, the operational reality of building on X changed in late 2022 and stayed changed. Endpoints get deprecated faster, rate limits move without long warning windows, and the public API roadmap is updated less predictably than it was in the Twitter era. Your safest bet is a widget vendor whose entire business depends on staying in sync with those changes. Poper monitors all X API v2 endpoints continuously, runs automated token refresh nightly, ships hot-fix deploys within hours of any breaking change, and falls back to oEmbed on any tweet whose feed source goes dark. Concretely that means your embed keeps showing posts even when X is mid-rollout of a breaking change, and you do not get a Slack ping on a Friday night because a hashtag widget went blank.