🐦 Twitter / X Scraper: Tweets, No Paid API Key

Part of the Social & Market Research MCP. This actor's data is also available to AI agents through our Social & Market Research MCP server — eight social, news and search-interest tools behind one endpoint. No result, no charge.

⚡ 17/17 runs succeeded in the last 30 days · public tweets, no paid X API key.

💸 You're only charged for delivered results. Empty searches, failed pages and duplicate listings are never billed.

Overview

Twitter / X Scraper pulls public tweets from X (formerly Twitter) by keyword, hashtag, or username, and returns them as clean, structured JSON without paying for the official X API. Give it a search term ("AI agents") or a handle ("@vercel"), and get back tweet text, author, engagement counts, view counts, and media URLs. No expensive API tier, no developer-app approval, no seat license.

Built for brand and social monitoring, market intelligence, journalism, research, and AI agents that need live tweet data.

Reliability posture: a profile that can't be found, a timeline with zero tweets, or a fetch that fails is never charged. You only pay for a tweet that was actually delivered.

✅ No paid API key | ✅ Keyword, hashtag & handle | ✅ Views, likes, retweets | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Keyword and hashtag search across public tweets with maxTweets cap. Handle scraping to pull a user's recent timeline tweets. Search filters for latest, top, media, or news slice. Rich engagement fields: likes, retweets, replies, and views. Same output whether you consume it via CSV, JSON, Excel, API, or MCP tool call.

How it works

X (formerly Twitter) closed off its free API tier, and the paid tiers start at hundreds of dollars per month with strict caps. This actor reads the public web search and timeline endpoints that power the X site itself, normalises the JSON, and returns one flat record per tweet. Session cookies or auth tokens are optional and only needed for higher-volume, longer-tail scrapes; smaller runs work fully unauthenticated.

The output is analytics-ready. Every tweet carries author, engagement counts, views, media URLs, hashtags, and mentions at the top level. Pipe straight into a dashboard, a warehouse, or a RAG index for a social-listening agent.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "searchTerms": ["AI agents", "#claudecode"],
  "handles": ["@vercel"],
  "maxTweets": 500,
  "searchFilter": "latest",
  "proxyConfig": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] },
  "sessionCookies": null,
  "authToken": null
}

📤 Output format

{
  "tweetId": "2077047278078931243",
  "authorVerified": true,
  "text": "We're introducing Claude for Teachers: free access to premium Claude capabilities for verified K-12 educators in the US, with a library of teaching skills and a direct connection to evidence-based curricula, mapped to academic standards in all 50 states.\n\nhttps://t.co/5hZZijVPCV https://t.co/5ofG8YLEON",
  "date": "2026-07-14T15:07:15.000Z",
  "likes": 18990,
  "retweets": 1465,
  "replies": 986,
  "views": 3900632,
  "isRetweet": false,
  "isReply": false,
  "mediaUrls": ["https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNMmWvKW4AAju32.jpg"],
  "source": "@AnthropicAI",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T04:15:31.538Z"
}

This record is from a live run against @AnthropicAI. Every tweet that reaches the dataset is billed once, and a tweet that fails to save is never billed.

Every tweet record can contain these fields. Fields X's API doesn't attach to a given tweet (for example authorName, authorHandle, authorUrl, tweetUrl, hashtags, or mentions when that data isn't present on a particular timeline entry) are simply left out of the record rather than sent as null, so not every tweet has every field below.

Field	Description
🆔 tweetId	X internal tweet ID
🔗 tweetUrl	Canonical tweet URL, when available
👤 authorName	Author display name, when available
🆔 authorHandle	Author handle including @, when available
🔗 authorUrl	Author profile URL, when available
✅ authorVerified	True if the author is verified
📝 text	Full tweet body text
📅 date	Post datetime in ISO
❤️ likes	Like count
🔁 retweets	Retweet count
💬 replies	Reply count
👀 views	View count
🔄 isRetweet	True if this is a retweet
↩️ isReply	True if this is a reply
🖼️ mediaUrls	Array of media URLs, when the tweet has media
🏷️ hashtags	Array of hashtags in the tweet, when present
👥 mentions	Array of mentioned handles, when present
🧭 source	The search term or @handle that returned this tweet
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

Brand and social monitoring Track every mention of your brand, product, or a competitor in near-real time. Route new tweets to Slack, a CRM, or a support inbox for triage.

Market and campaign intelligence Measure the volume, sentiment, and reach of a hashtag or launch campaign. Benchmark share of voice across a competitive set on X.

Journalism and research Assemble a dataset of tweets around a news event, election, or crisis. Preserve public tweets for academic or newsroom analysis.

AI social copilots Give an agent live X data so it can answer "what are people saying about X?" Feed structured tweet data into a live RAG index for a social listening bot.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and set searchTerms for keyword or hashtag search, or handles for user timelines.
2. Pick a searchFilter (latest, top, media, or news).
3. Set maxTweets to cap volume, and keep residential proxy on.
4. Optionally supply sessionCookies or authToken for higher-volume runs.
5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull it via API or MCP.

💵 Pricing

One event, tweet-scraped, charged per tweet delivered to your dataset. The rate depends on your Apify discount tier:

Your Apify tier	Price per tweet	Per 1,000 tweets
FREE	$0.003	$3.00
BRONZE	$0.00255	$2.55
SILVER	$0.00215	$2.15
GOLD / PLATINUM / DIAMOND	$0.0018	$1.80

Pay as you go — no subscription and no developer-app approval. A profile that can't be found, a timeline with zero tweets, and a fetch that fails are never billed: the charge fires per tweet actually delivered, so an empty run costs nothing.

Prices vary by your Apify discount tier (FREE, BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD; PLATINUM and DIAMOND are enterprise tiers). The actor's Pricing tab shows the exact rate applied to your account.

⏰ Run it on a schedule

Brand and hashtag monitoring is the natural recurring use — a standing keyword or handle query that keeps a rolling record of what's being said.

1. On this actor's page, click ⋯ → Schedule actor (or Console → Schedules → Create new).
2. Pick a frequency — @hourly or @daily for live brand monitoring; @weekly for share-of-voice reporting.
3. Your saved input is reused on every run; each run appends to a named dataset.
4. Wire the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack, or a webhook via the actor's Integrations tab so new records reach you automatically.

FAQ

Do I need X API access? No. The actor reads public web endpoints, so you skip the paid X API tier entirely.

How far back can it go? Keyword search covers roughly the same public window that x.com search itself exposes, ordered by latest or top. Handle scraping pulls the user's recent public timeline.

Do I need cookies or a token? No for smaller runs. Larger, longer runs (thousands of tweets over hours) can benefit from an auth token or session cookie for steadier throughput.

How much does it cost? From $3.00 per 1,000 tweets on the FREE tier, down to $1.80 per 1,000 on GOLD and above. You pay per tweet actually delivered, so empty runs cost nothing. Full table in Pricing.

Can I use it inside an AI agent? Yes. It is exposed as an MCP tool. See below.

Can I scrape tweets from a specific date range? Not as an input filter — there is no dateFrom/dateTo field. Use searchFilter: "latest" with a maxTweets cap to walk back from the present, then filter on the date field in the output. Keyword search only reaches as far back as x.com's own public search exposes.

How is this different from the official X API? No developer application to get approved, no monthly subscription, and you pay only for tweets delivered. The trade-off is scope: this reads the public search and timeline surfaces, so you get public tweets and their engagement counts — not streaming/firehose access, DMs, or account-level endpoints that require authenticated API scopes.

Why should I leave the residential proxy on? X rate-limits and blocks data-centre IP ranges aggressively. The actor defaults to Apify's RESIDENTIAL proxy group so requests come from consumer ISPs and look like ordinary visitors, which is what keeps run success high. Turning it off will cost you far more in failed runs than it saves.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/twitter-x-scraper

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('themineworks/twitter-x-scraper').call({
  searchTerms: ['AI agents'],
  maxTweets: 500,
  searchFilter: 'latest',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

🛠️ Complete your social listening pipeline

Pair this actor with the rest of the themineworks social and brand suite:

• TikTok Shop Products Scraper: cross-reference social buzz with what people are actually buying.
• YouTube Transcript Scraper: add long-form video sentiment to your listening.
• B2B Leads Finder: turn engaged companies into decision-maker contacts.

Typical flow: twitter-x-scraper surfaces the wave, tiktok-shop-products validates commercial pull, b2b-leads-finder helps you reach the buyer.

Questions or need a custom field set? Reach out through the Apify profile.