Free Twitter (X) analytics in 2026: what is still free, what moved behind Premium, and why the free tools died

What is still free on X itself

Every account, Premium or not, gets per-post analytics. Open one of your posts and tap the bar-chart icon (or View post engagements) and you see:

The public view count is the quietly important one. Since X put views under every post in December 2022, you can benchmark any account against any other without an API, a tool or a login. It is coarse, but it is the only free competitor analytics X has ever offered.

What moved behind Premium

The account analytics dashboard — reached from More → Premium → Analytics or x.com/i/account_analytics — shows impressions, engagement, profile visits, follower change and your top posts over a selectable window with charts. Access to it on the web now requires a Premium subscription, and it is the feature most people mean when they say “Twitter analytics”.

Why the free Twitter analytics tools disappeared

Every free analytics tool you remember — the ones that graphed your follower growth, found your best posting hour, listed who unfollowed you — ran on the Twitter API, which was free. The timeline of what happened to that API is the timeline of those tools shutting down:

The arithmetic makes “free” impossible. Suppose a tool tracks 1,000 of your posts and refreshes their metrics once a day to draw a trend line. That is 1,000 reads a day, 30,000 a month — $150 a month per user at $0.005 a read, before the tool has done anything else. A tool with a thousand free users would be spending $150,000 a month on reads. The only free access X still grants is to public-utility accounts posting safety information, case by case.

This is also why the scheduling tools that still connect to X either charge extra for it or exclude it from free plans — every post they publish costs them $0.015, or $0.20 if it carries a link.

A $0 routine for tracking your own X performance

The per-post panel has everything the dashboard has, minus the aggregation and the history. You can supply both with a spreadsheet and ten minutes a week.

1. 1
   Log each post 48 hours after publishing

   Most X posts collect over 90% of their lifetime impressions within two days, so a 48-hour reading is stable. Record date, hour, format (text, image, video, link, thread), impressions, engagements, detail expands, profile visits and link clicks.

2. 2
   Compute three rates

   Engagement rate = engagements ÷ impressions. Stop rate = detail expands ÷ impressions. Recruit rate = profile visits ÷ impressions. Each answers a different question: did they act, did they stop, did they want more of you.

3. 3
   Segment by format and hour

   Average each rate by format and by posting hour after 30 posts. This is what the Premium dashboard cannot do — it shows you top posts, not why they were top.

4. 4
   Benchmark against public view counts

   Pick five accounts of similar size in your niche and note the views on their last ten posts. Views per follower is a rough but free comparison of distribution.

5. 5
   Keep the history

   X’s dashboard, when you have it, shows limited windows. Your sheet shows two years. That is the asset.

What the paid tools add, so you know what you are not missing

• Follower growth over time — the dashboard has it; your sheet approximates it by logging your follower count weekly.
• Best time to post — computed from your own engagement by hour, which is exactly what the sheet builds.
• Competitor tracking — impossible for free since 2023; the public view count is the only free proxy.
• Unfollower lists — gone from every tool, because a follower diff requires reading the full follower list, at $0.005 a page.
• Reports and exports — the Premium dashboard can export; the sheet is already a spreadsheet.

Where PostMCP fits

PostMCP publishes and schedules to X and does not have an analytics module. What it records is the publishing side: which profile each post went to, whether it succeeded, X’s own error if it did not, and the live permalink — which is the URL you open for the free per-post panel above. If you want X analytics, X’s own per-post view and a spreadsheet are the free answer and Premium is the $8 one. If you want to schedule to X alongside six other networks, with link-carrying posts included, that is what the X scheduler and X API pages cover.