How X, Reddit and Stack Overflow price your own data

X's API pricing, effective February 2026, charges $0.005 per post read with no free tier and enterprise access running roughly $42,000/month. It is the latest instance of a broader pattern already visible at Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Meta: platforms first secure broad rights to user content through terms-of-service changes or licensing deals, then price or shut down the very APIs that used to let users and researchers retrieve that same content.

Reddit's reported $60 million-a-year deal with Google and Stack Overflow's OpenAI partnership monetized years of user-written content signed away under older terms of service, while third-party clients like Apollo and Tweetbot were priced or cut out of existence. Meta skipped metering altogether and simply killed CrowdTangle, replacing it with an access-restricted tool.

The enforcement layer closes the loop: Stack Overflow suspended users who tried to delete their own answers after the OpenAI deal, and Reddit sued Anthropic for scraping without payment, treating user content as platform property in the dispute. For engineers building on these APIs, the economics are now explicit — a unit price on other people's writing, with original authors receiving no share of the revenue.

Expect other platforms with meaningful text corpora to converge on the same sequence — train, meter, enforce — unless structural constraints, such as federated protocols or EU researcher-access mandates, get in the way.