X (Twitter) Profile & Tweets Scraper

Give it a handle, get back that account's profile and tweets as clean JSON. No login, no cookies, no session tokens, no proxy configuration. Point it at nasa, https://x.com/openai, or a numeric user ID, and it returns structured records you can drop straight into a database or feed to an agent.

You are charged only for results that actually came back. No mock rows, no placeholder padding, no minimum charge on a run that found nothing. If an account is suspended, protected, or does not exist, the run reports why and charges you nothing for it.

Input	X / Twitter handles, profile URLs, or numeric user IDs
Output	Tweets (text, metrics, media, mentions, links) + enriched author profiles
Price	$0.005 per account + $0.0003 per tweet ($0.30 per 1,000)
Login required	No — and that is why it does not break when scraper accounts get banned
Keyword search	Not supported. See What this Actor cannot do

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What you get

Tweets

Every tweet record carries the text (including full long-form posts, which many scrapers truncate at 280 characters), timestamps, all six engagement counters, and fully expanded entities:

{
  "itemType": "tweet",
  "type": "tweet",
  "id": "2090487779268407625",
  "url": "https://x.com/NASA/status/2090487779268407625",
  "text": "Our Artemis II crew is one step closer to the Moon.",
  "isLongform": false,
  "lang": "en",
  "createdAt": "2026-08-19T14:02:11.000Z",
  "source": "Twitter Media Studio",
  "replyCount": 412, "retweetCount": 3105, "quoteCount": 188,
  "likeCount": 24907, "bookmarkCount": 601, "viewCount": 1840233,
  "conversationId": "2090487779268407625",
  "isRetweet": false, "isQuote": false, "isReply": false,
  "hashtags": ["Artemis"],
  "cashtags": [],
  "mentions": [{ "userName": "NASAArtemis", "userId": "1050393...", "name": "NASA Artemis" }],
  "urls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii/"],
  "media": [{ "type": "photo", "url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/...jpg", "altText": "Four astronauts in orange flight suits" }],
  "authorUserName": "NASA",
  "author": { "...full profile, see below..." }
}

Retweets and quote tweets keep their lineage — retweetedTweetId, retweetedAuthor, quotedTweetId, quotedText — so you can tell original content from amplification without a second pass.

Profiles

The profile record goes past the usual follower-count-and-bio. These fields come straight from X's own account metadata; none of them are guessed, inferred, or generated by a language model:

Field	Why it matters
verifiedType	Government, Business, or blank — separates official accounts from paid blue checks
verifiedSince	Exact ISO timestamp the account was verified
parodyCommentaryFanLabel	X's mandatory label for parody / commentary / fan accounts — a direct impersonation signal
affiliatesCount	How many sub-accounts a business account has under it
professionalCategory	Self-declared business category for professional accounts
tipjar	Bitcoin, Ethereum, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Patreon, GoFundMe and Bandcamp handles the account has published
birthdate	Publicly published birthdate, with its visibility setting
isProtected, hasGraduatedAccess, possiblySensitive	Account state flags

Plus the standard set: userId, name, description, descriptionUrls (expanded, not t.co), website, location, createdAt, followers, following, tweetsCount, mediaCount, favouritesCount, isBlueVerified, profilePicture (full resolution), coverPicture.

---

Input

{
  "twitterHandles": ["nasa", "openai"],
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://x.com/elonmusk" }],
  "maxTweetsPerProfile": 200,
  "includeRetweets": false,
  "since": "2026-01-01"
}

Option	Default	Notes
twitterHandles	—	With or without @
startUrls	—	Any x.com/<handle> or twitter.com/<handle> URL
userIds	—	Numeric IDs, immune to username changes
maxTweetsPerProfile	100	0 fetches the profile only
maxItems	0	Hard cap across the whole run — bounds your spend
scrapeProfilesOnly	false	Cheapest mode for bulk account enrichment
includeReplies	true
includeRetweets	true
onlyWithMedia	false
since / until	—	ISO dates; since also stops pagination early, so it makes runs cheaper
includeAuthorProfile	true	Turn off for a slimmer dataset

---

Pricing

Pay-per-event. You pay for what came back, nothing else.

Event	Price	What it covers
profile-scraped	$0.005 per account	Looking the account up and returning its enriched profile. Charged once per account.
tweet-scraped	$0.0003 per tweet	Each tweet returned from that account's timeline — $0.30 per 1,000.

Two events instead of one flat per-row price, because the work is shaped that way: resolving an account costs the same whether you then pull 10 tweets from it or 2,000. Splitting it out is what lets the per-tweet rate stay at $0.30/1K instead of being marked up to subsidise account lookups.

What it works out to, against the closest comparable Actor on the Store, which charges $0.016 per profile plus $0.0004 per tweet:

You want	Here	Closest comparable
1 account, 10 tweets (monitoring)	$0.008	$0.016
1 account, 100 tweets	$0.035	$0.040
1 account, 2,000 tweets (archive)	$0.605	$0.800
10 accounts, 200 tweets each	$0.650	$0.920

Cheaper than that one at every volume, not just at the volume that makes the table look good.

Being straight about the rest of the field: a few Actors run a flat per-tweet rate slightly below this one and come out ahead on very large single-account pulls. They are also doing keyword search, which means they are driving a pool of logged-in accounts. That is a different tool with a different failure mode — see What this Actor cannot do.

Three commitments:

1. Real results only. Every charged row is data that came back from X. Padding a thin result set with placeholder rows and billing for them is a thing that happens in this category; it does not happen here.
2. Failures are free. Suspended, deleted, protected, or misspelled accounts produce an explanatory row and cost nothing — including the account lookup fee.
3. No plan discrimination. Free-plan runs get the same code path, the same data, and the same reliability as everyone else.

There is a $0.01 floor on the run budget you can set. That is a floor on the budget cap, not a minimum charge — a run that returns one profile still costs you $0.005.

What you are not charged for

Those three commitments are not abstract. Each one names a specific thing that this Actor does not do, and every item below is checkable against a run log:

	What happens here
Empty or placeholder rows	A tweet that arrives with an ID but no text, no timestamp, and no metrics is not a result. It is dropped before it reaches the dataset, so it is never billed.
Runs that find nothing	A suspended, deleted, protected, or misspelled account produces one explanatory row marked chargedForThis: false. The account fee is not charged either.
The free plan	Same code path, same fields, same page depth. No demo mode, no 10-row cap, no nulls in place of data.
Plan-tiered pricing	$0.005 per account and $0.0003 per tweet on every Apify plan — Free, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond. Check the Pricing tab: all six columns are identical.

That last row is worth checking on any Actor you are comparing, including this one. The Pricing tab shows the per-plan breakdown, and the number a listing advertises in its title is not always the number a free-plan run pays.

Many accounts, few tweets each

If you are monitoring a set of accounts rather than archiving one, you want a cap that applies per account, in a single run. That is the default here:

{
  "twitterHandles": ["NASA", "NASAHubble", "NASAWebb", "NASAPersevere", "NASAMars"],
  "maxTweetsPerProfile": 3,
  "since": "2026-06-01"
}

One run, five accounts, at most three tweets each, nothing older than the cutoff. Real output:

NASA            profile + 3 tweets
NASAHubble      profile + 3 tweets
NASAWebb        profile + 3 tweets
NASAMars        profile + 3 tweets
NASAPersevere   profile + 0 tweets   ← nothing past the cutoff, so nothing billed
                                       charged: 12 tweets, 5 accounts = $0.0286

since / until filter on the tweet timestamp and stop paging once the timeline passes the cutoff, so a narrow window costs less than a wide one rather than the same.

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What this Actor cannot do

Being straight about this up front so you do not buy the wrong tool:

• No keyword or hashtag search. X does not expose search to logged-out clients at all — the endpoint is rejected at the edge before it reaches a backend. Any scraper that offers keyword search is driving it through a pool of logged-in accounts. This Actor deliberately does not do that, which is the same reason it cannot search. If you need search, you need a different tool.
• No followers or following lists. Same restriction.
• No likes, bookmarks, or reply threads of an arbitrary tweet.
• Protected accounts return their profile only. Their tweets are not public, and no scraper can change that.

What it does do — profiles and timelines by account — it does without a single login, which is why it is not exposed to the account-ban failures that take login-based scrapers offline.

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How it stays working

X rotates the internal query identifiers its own web app uses. Scrapers that hardcode them break silently, usually returning empty results rather than an error.

This Actor reads those identifiers from X's live frontend at runtime and caches them for six hours. If a call comes back rejected, it re-reads them and retries once. That repair path is plain pattern matching against the frontend bundle — deterministic, auditable, and with no language model anywhere in the data path, so your output cannot drift between runs.

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FAQ

Do I need a Twitter/X API key? No. There is no key, no developer account, and no OAuth app to register.

Do I need to supply cookies or a logged-in session? No. Actors that ask for an auth_token cookie are running on someone's logged-in account, which puts that account at risk of suspension and takes the scraper down with it.

Do I need proxies? No. Proxy configuration is not an input because the Actor does not need one.

How many tweets can I get from one account? The timeline pages back roughly 15–20 tweets at a time and keeps going. Set maxTweetsPerProfile to whatever you need; use since when you only care about a recent window.

Can I get tweets older than the timeline goes back? X's own timeline is the ceiling. For deep historical archives you want a data provider, not a scraper.

What happens if X changes something? Query identifier rotation is handled automatically (see above). Structural changes are not, and would need an update — if output looks wrong, open an issue on the Actor and it gets fixed.

Is scraping X legal? Scraping publicly accessible pages has been treated differently from accessing a computer without authorization — see hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, where the Ninth Circuit held that scraping public profiles did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That said, this is general background and not legal advice: platform terms, your jurisdiction, and what you do with the data all matter, and personal data carries its own obligations under GDPR and similar regimes. Get advice for your own situation.

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Integrating

Every Apify Actor exposes a REST API, so you can start a run and read results from any language:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<ACTOR_ID>/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<TOKEN>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"twitterHandles":["nasa"],"maxTweetsPerProfile":50}'

Official clients exist for JavaScript and Python, and results can be exported as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pushed onward through Apify integrations.