How Do You Monitor X Mentions Without Enterprise Pricing?

Tagged Mentions Are Free, and That Changes the Question

Two different jobs hide inside the word monitoring, and only one of them costs money. When someone tags your @handle or replies to one of your posts, X delivers it to your notifications, free, on every account type, and no API pricing change can take that away, because notifying you is the platform working as intended. If most people who talk about you tag you, which is true for plenty of small brands and service businesses, the monitoring problem is already solved and the job is really a checking habit.

The job that costs money is the other one: catching posts that mention your brand without tagging it, watching a competitor's name, or following the replies under someone else's post. That needs search, run on a schedule, by something that does not sleep, and search access is exactly the thing X spent three years pricing.

Before any paid tool, wring out X's own search, because the operators still work and saved searches persist. The brand watch is one query: your brand name in quotes, OR the unspaced version people actually type, minus your own handle so your posts stay out of it, minus retweets. Something like "acme coffee" OR acmecoffee -from:acmecoffee -filter:retweets, saved and pinned, does the finding half of what an enterprise tool does. What it will not do is come and get you: X does not alert on saved searches, so you check it with your morning coffee or you do not check it at all, and that babysitting is the actual product you buy when you pay for a listening tool. One thing that cannot stand in: Google Alerts, because Google's index of X is thin to the point of useless here.

What Actually Happened to the Cheap Middle, With the Numbers

TweetDeck's free columns died in August 2023, when X moved the rebuilt XPro behind Premium at $8 a month. Then in March 2026, without notice, XPro moved again, this time behind Premium+ at $40 a month, and people who had been paying $8 opened their columns to a paywall. So the tool working social people used for exactly this job now costs more than the budget end of the listening market, and it is still a posting-and-timelines tool with no alerting.

On the API side: in 2023 X cut off the old free access and repriced. The free tier kept posting and lost reading, the Basic tier ended up at $200 a month for a modest read allowance, and the tier with enough search volume to run a real monitoring product on cost $5,000 a month. That is what killed the small tools; a $29-a-month product cannot pay X $5,000 for its raw material. The suites that survived are the ones whose customers can absorb that bill, which is how the market ended up free-but-manual on one end and enterprise-or-nothing on the other.

Then, in February 2026, X quietly replaced those subscriptions for new developers with pay-per-use billing: half a cent per post read, one and a half cents per post created, prepaid credits, no monthly minimum, a 7-day search window, and a ceiling of two million reads a month. By June it had begun migrating the old $200 Basic accounts onto the same meter. That changes the answer, because the cost of watching a brand name stopped being a $200 floor and became the price of what you actually pull back.

The Do-It-Yourself Route

The architecture fits in a sentence: every 15 minutes, call the recent search endpoint with the same query you would save in the app, pass the newest result ID back in as since_id so you only receive posts you have not already seen, and forward anything that comes back to Slack, Discord, or email. n8n, Make, or a plain cron script can hold that loop, and X charges for the posts the search returns, with a repeat read of the same post inside 24 hours counted once. One correction worth making to the common version of this advice: the free tier has no search access, so what makes the build cheap is the pay-per-use meter rather than the free plan. Which schedulers and social tools expose enough API surface to sit in a stack like this is covered in which social media schedulers integrate with n8n.

The arithmetic is the point. A brand that gets mentioned 300 times a month costs about $1.50 to watch. The 2,000 mentions that Brand24's entry plan caps you at would cost about $10 on the meter. Even a noisy keyword pulling 10,000 posts a month runs $50, a quarter of the entry price of the nearest subscription tool. The real costs sit elsewhere: a developer account and an app to set up, credits to prepay, a workflow to check on occasionally, and no sentiment, no history dashboards, and no report you can hand a client.

The other cheap route is tools that read X without touching the API at all, by scraping the public site. There is a small ecosystem of them, usually free or nearly free, and the trade is the same for all: they live outside X's terms of service, they break when the site changes, and they can be blocked without notice. For a personal ping-me channel that is a risk you can decide to accept; as infrastructure for client work it is the wrong foundation, for the reasons how risky third-party social media tools really are walks through.

The Paid Options, Priced Honestly

The middle of the market is thinner than it was in the TweetDeck era, and it is not empty. Awario gets filed under enterprise by people who have not checked its pricing lately, and it is actually the budget end of the category. Brand24's real entry pricing is higher than the old promo codes people remember. And Mention, the other name everyone reaches for, closed its cheap plans to new customers in 2025 and moved upmarket, which quietly removed it from this conversation.

Ration the Pings

Tier the alerts. Instant notifications only for the tiny list that justifies interrupting you, your brand name, your own handle, competitor launches, and everything else accumulates into one weekly digest you actually sit down and read. Alert on everything and you will start ignoring the channel inside a week, which is worse than having no channel, because you believe you are covered.

Then separate someone is annoyed at us from someone mentioned us, and let the angry ones jump the line. A complaint on X compounds in a way a compliment does not, so the mention you want in minutes is the unhappy one. The practical version is a second, louder route for mentions containing your business's complaint words, refund, broken, worst, whatever yours are, whether that is a separate n8n branch, a storm alert in a listening tool, or a second saved search you check more often than the first.

There is an offensive version of the same discipline. On X, being early into a conversation is most of the value, and mentions are the conversations you have the strongest standing to join, so a mention pinged in minutes is worth several found on Friday. The mechanics of replying well, and why replies grow a small account faster than posts do, are covered in how to grow on Twitter.

Where We Fit, Which Is Mostly Not Here

Maeve connects X for publishing: the Twitter scheduler queues posts and threads so a steady presence does not require living in the composer. Monitoring is a different matter. Maeve's inbox collects comments, DMs, reviews, and mentions into one queue for connected Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts, and X is not on that list, for exactly the economics this page has been describing: the platforms in the inbox make conversation data available to approved tools at a price a $25-a-month product can carry, and X does not.

So the fit is this: if X is one channel among several and the daily grind is really conversations on Meta platforms plus a steady X posting cadence, a scheduler with an inbox covers most of the week and one of the cheap monitors above covers the X gap. What separates an engagement queue from a listening tool is its own page: the best social media engagement tools. And if the wider question is when any of these line items is worth paying for at all, that judgment lives in how to justify the cost of social media tools.