Do I need a Twitter/X API key to track accounts?

No — not to use X-Relay. You paste a handle or a keyword; there is no developer account, no key and no code on your side. A developer account is a builder's tool: it hands you credentials, not notifications. If what you want is "tell me in Discord or Telegram when this account posts", the key is not the missing piece — the polling, the de-duplication, the filtering and the delivery are.

What is an X developer account for?

A developer account exists so that software you write can talk to X. You register on the X developer platform, create a project and an app, and receive keys and tokens. Access comes in tiers that differ in what you may pull and how much — we deliberately quote no figures, because limits on someone else's platform change without telling you.

The important part is what the key is not. It is not a notification service, and it watches nothing for you. With a key in hand you still write the program that polls X, remembers what it already saw, decides whether a reply or retweet counts, formats the result, pushes it to a Discord webhook or Telegram chat, and survives the night a request fails — then you maintain it. X's own API support pages describe endpoints; none of them describe an alert.

It is worth it when the end product is your software, and the wrong purchase when the end product is you finding out about a post.

Do I need a key to get alerts on an account?

No. There are three no-key routes, and they are not equivalent.

A managed tracker. This is what X-Relay is. You add the bot to Discord or open it in Telegram, paste the public handle, and pick where alerts land. It then watches posts, replies and quotes with the parent post shown, profile changes, follows and unfollows, Spaces, and contract addresses on Solana, EVM and TON with DexScreener data and buy buttons attached. Foreign-language posts get auto-translated, and a whole X List goes in as one link (X's Lists documentation explains how to build one). On speed we publish two figures and no others: we re-check a tracked account as often as every 300 ms, and our fastest measured detection was 281 ms — the best of 51,655 detections over 72 hours on production, so a record rather than a typical result.

X's own bell notifications. Free, no key, already on your phone — but they land in the X app rather than the channel you trade in, cannot be filtered, and go quiet in ways nobody explains. See why the bell is unreliable.

Feed bridges and automations. Tools that turn a profile into an RSS feed, or automation services with an X trigger, need no key either. They poll on a schedule and tend to carry main posts only: the cheapest route, and the one that ages worst.

Do I need a key to get alerts on a keyword?

Also no — but keep the two questions apart. Watching an account means asking a known source for its newest posts. Watching a keyword means asking X's search index, and a post must be indexed before search returns it to anyone. No tool, key or not, skips that step — which is why keyword monitoring sits structurally behind account monitoring.

Without a key you can still run keyword, cashtag and operator queries through a managed search tracker, with filters that keep the channel readable: minimum followers or likes, language, exclude replies, exclude retweets, and a whale filter that fires only when an account you already track says the term. A surge detector flags a phrase picking up. Aimed at profiles instead of posts, the same idea is Bio Watch (/addbio): it fires when a new account puts your keyword in its bio, catching a project before its first post. For tickers, see cashtag monitoring.

What breaks on the no-key routes?

Every route here avoids the developer account, but not the same problems.

The failure that hurts is not the loud one. A bridge that errors is fine — you see it and fix it. What costs money is the route that looks healthy while quietly dropping things: a poll on a timer collapses a burst into one check, and a main-posts-only source never tells you the contract address was in the reply underneath. If you cannot tell "nothing was posted" from "we stopped seeing posts", you do not have monitoring.

What does X-Relay ask for instead?

Nothing that belongs to you. X-Relay reads only public posts: no X login, no password, no cookies or session to upload — some tools ask for those, we do not — and no wallet keys or seed phrase. You add the bot, paste public handles, and point alerts at your own Discord webhook or Telegram chat. There is nothing on your account to compromise, because the bot never touches it. Full write-up: security.

What it does ask for is a plan. Discord is free for 2 accounts; Telegram is paid after a 3-day trial. Paid plans run from Lite (10 accounts, $15 a month or $39 for three) to Pro (75 accounts, $69 or $179) — every feature is on every paid plan, the tiers differ only in how many accounts you watch. Turbo, which raises how often we re-check, is a separate add-on. Crypto only, no KYC.

Setup

1. Open @x_relay_bot, or add X-Relay to your Discord server.
2. Paste the handles — or an X List link — and enable posts, replies, quotes, profile events and CA detection. For phrases, add a search tracker (/addsearch on Discord) with filters.
3. Point it at your own private channel. No key, no code, nothing to host.

FAQ

Keyword tracker → · CA detection → · Security → · Guides and comparisons → · Pricing →