How do I give my AI agent live X (Twitter) search without the official X API?

A developer-tools startup ships on Tuesday. They want an agent that checks X every hour, picks out posts worth answering, and drops them in Slack with a one-line reason. The agent needs live search, a way to read what a few key accounts said, and nothing that involves logging bot accounts into X. Three endpoints cover it, and each call is billed on its own, so a quiet hour costs one call.

The tools to give the agent

• X post search runs a query with X's own syntax: "your product" -from:yourhandle lang:en, sorted latest or top. Each call is one page of about 20 posts.
• X account posts returns an account's posts, newest first, by handle. Useful for "what did these 30 people say this week".
• X trending topics returns trends worldwide or for one country (country=US, JP, ...).

Over the MCP server the agent finds and calls these on its own. In a scheduled job it is a short loop:

import json, os, pathlib
import requests

API = "https://api.okdata.online"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
SEEN = pathlib.Path("seen_ids.json")

seen = set(json.loads(SEEN.read_text())) if SEEN.exists() else set()
params = {"query": '"acme cli" -from:acme_dev', "sort": "latest",
          "fields": "id,url,text,published_at,metrics.likes,author.username,author.followers"}
body = requests.get(API + "/v1/x/posts/search", headers=H, params=params, timeout=60).json()
if body["code"] != "ok":
    raise SystemExit(f"{body['code']}: {body['message']}")

new = [p for p in body["data"]["items"] if p["id"] not in seen]
SEEN.write_text(json.dumps(sorted(seen | {p["id"] for p in new})))
print(f"{len(new)} new posts for the agent to triage")  # hand `new` to your model

What it costs

Job	Calls	Cost
One search page every hour for 30 days	720	$4.32
1,000 posts from search	50	$0.30
Latest posts of 50 accounts, daily for 30 days	1,500	$9.00
Trends for 3 countries, daily for 30 days	90	$0.81

Gotchas

• Every page is a separate charge. Tell the agent its limit in the tool description ("stop after 3 pages") and enforce it in code.
• Search sees public posts. Protected accounts are invisible, and operators that depend on a logged-in user, such as filter:follows, mean nothing here.
• top and latest return different sets. Monitoring wants latest; research on what resonated wants top.
• On a burst you may get rate_limited; wait the seconds it gives, then retry with the same Idempotency-Key.
• Post text is written by strangers. The agent should treat it as data when it decides what to flag.

Alternatives

If the agent must also post or reply, use the official X API; it needs a developer account and X bills it directly, but it is the sanctioned way to write. twscrape and similar open-source tools are free and run on X accounts you supply; expect those accounts to be locked from time to time, which is fine for a hobby project and painful for an alert people rely on. More on monitoring mentions across platforms is on the word-of-mouth page.