Best Proxies for Twitter/X Data Collection in 2026
By Elena Park · 2026-03-27 · 10 min read · Use Cases
X's API costs $5k/month for serious volume. Scraping the web app is cheaper — if your proxies are clean.
Why scrape instead of API
X's API Basic tier ($200/mo) caps at 10k tweets/month read. Pro is $5k/mo. For comparable volume, scraping costs ~$50/mo of residential bandwidth — but you accept the maintenance burden.
X's defense
Datacenter IPs return blank timelines. Residentials work but X aggressively rate-limits per IP — about 50 requests per 15-min window before soft-banning.
Pool picks
Bright Data residential — has an X-focused dataset that's pre-collected and refreshed daily
Decodo residential — best $/GB for DIY
IPRoyal residential — budget alternative, slightly higher failure rate
Use the GraphQL endpoint
X's web app talks to /i/api/graphql/*. Each operation has a stable operationId. You can build a clean JSON pipeline against these endpoints with the right Bearer token (extracted from the public web bundle) and proper rate limiting.
Read-only is much easier than write
Following/posting/DM from scraped sessions = guaranteed ban within hours. Read-only timeline/search/user scraping = sustainable indefinitely with proper IP rotation.
FAQ
Is the X API worth it?
Only if you need real-time firehose access or are doing >100k tweets/day on a long-term contract.