The Problem: X API Pricing

If you’ve tried to build anything that monitors Twitter/X lately, you’ve hit the wall: $200/month minimum for API access that actually works.

Want to track mentions of your brand? $200/mo. Monitor a competitor’s feed? $200/mo. Build a simple alert system? $200/mo.

For hobbyists, indie hackers, and small teams, that’s a non-starter.

The Workaround: Grok API

Here’s what I discovered: Grok (xAI’s model) has native access to real-time X data. And Grok API pricing? $0.20 per million input tokens.

Do the math:

• X API Basic: $200/month flat
• Grok API monitoring 100 feeds daily: ~$5-10/month

That’s a 20-40x cost reduction.

What I Built

I created X Feed Monitor - an Apify actor that:

1. Takes a list of X usernames or search terms
2. Uses Grok API to fetch recent posts
3. Returns structured JSON with tweets, engagement metrics, timestamps
4. Runs on schedule (hourly, daily, whatever you need)

Basic Usage

{
"targets": ["elonmusk", "apaborhes"],
"grokApiKey": "your-key-here",
"postsPerTarget": 10
}

Output

{
"username": "elonmusk",
"posts": [
{
"text": "...",
"timestamp": "2024-12-15T10:30:00Z",
"likes": 45000,
"retweets": 8200,
"replies": 3100
}
]
}

Use Cases

Brand Monitoring: Track mentions without enterprise pricing Competitor Analysis: See what competitors are posting, how it performs Research: Collect data for analysis without scraping concerns Alerts: Pipe output to Slack/Discord when keywords appear

Limitations (Being Honest)

• Not official API: You’re getting data through Grok’s knowledge, not Twitter’s firehose
• Rate limits: Grok has its own limits, though generous for most use cases
• Freshness: Near real-time, not guaranteed instant
• No write access: Read-only monitoring, can’t post or interact

Try It

The actor is live on Apify: X Feed Monitor

Free tier available. Bring your own Grok API key (get one at x.ai).

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Questions? Find me on X @CrawlingTheWeb or check out my other actors on Apify.