xAI stops charging for searches on X and starts charging for what they bring back — including posts nobody asked for

From 21 September 2026 at 12:00 PT, xAI bills its X Search tool by the item it returns rather than by the request that triggered it. The documented rate changes from 5 US dollars per 1,000 calls to 5 US dollars per 1,000 posts fetched and 10 US dollars per 1,000 user profiles fetched. Under the old rule the size of an answer did not matter: one call cost half a cent whether it came back with one post or fifty. Under the new one the same call costs half a cent for every post in the response, and a search over user accounts costs a full cent for each profile returned. The documentation states the counting rule plainly: "Every post returned by a search or thread fetch, including parent and quoted posts, counts", and "every profile returned by a user search counts". The clause about parent and quoted posts is the part worth reading twice. When the tool pulls a thread, the posts above the one being examined and the posts it quotes are billed as well, even though nothing in the query asked for them. The developer does not choose them; the structure of the conversation on X does. Neither the pricing page nor the tool documentation names a ceiling for how many posts a single call may return, and no parameter for capping that number appears in the published description of the tool. The upper bound of what one search can cost is therefore not stated anywhere in the documentation — a change of kind, not only of rate, because the old model had a fixed maximum per call by construction. X Search is now the only server-side tool xAI prices this way. Web search and code execution remain at 5 dollars per 1,000 calls, file attachment search at 10 dollars and collections search at 2.50 dollars per 1,000 calls — all counted per invocation. xAI's own guidance notes that the agent decides how many tools to call, so "costs scale with query complexity"; for searches on X, cost now scales with how talkative the platform is as well.