People building agents
Most of the traffic. An agent is handed a link in a chat and needs the post behind it — the text, the numbers, the thread it belongs to — without a credential that its operator has to buy, store and rotate.
Why this exists
In 2023 X closed its free API, then priced the replacement at $200 a month for a tier that still cannot read most posts. A month later, x.com began asking logged-out readers to sign in after two posts.
The people that hurt were not the ones who could pay. They were students, researchers, hobbyists and the enormous number of small AI tools that needed to read a handful of public posts and now could not.
XCrap is the smallest possible answer to that. It reads pages that anyone could read in a browser and hands them back in a shape a model can use. That is all it does.
Who actually uses it
Researchers
A thesis on how a claim spread does not have a $200-a-month line item. Neither does a class of forty students who each need to pull two hundred posts for one assignment.
Journalists and archivists
A post cited in a story should still be readable when the account is deleted, renamed or suspended. Reading it into Markdown and keeping that is the difference between a source and a dead link.
Anyone sent a link
Swap x.com for xcrap.cc in the address bar and read the thing. No account, no app install, no two-post limit, no interstitial asking you to sign in.
What it will not do
It will not read anything private
Protected accounts, direct messages, anything behind a personal login. XCrap reads public accounts only: their posts, their profiles, the replies under their posts and their follower lists.
It will not keep your data
Posts are cached for five days and then deleted. Media is streamed through and never written to disk. There is no archive here to subpoena or to leak.
It will not charge you later
There is no key to generate, so there is no key to start billing. If the running costs stop being covered, the honest move is to say so, not to add a paywall.
It will not argue with an opt-out
Ask to be excluded and you are excluded, the same day, no form and no justification required.
The part where we say what we think
X shut the free API in 2023 and priced the replacement so that reading public posts became a business expense. The stated reason was that the data was too valuable to give away.
It was given away. To Grok. The same public posts that a student cannot read for free are training and serving a chatbot owned by the same company — sold back, at a subscription, as an answer about the posts you were not allowed to read. The data was never too valuable to give away. It was too valuable to let anybody else have.
X’s terms now forbid anyone else from using posts on X to train an AI model, while Grok, built by xAI, X’s parent company, is trained on them. Elon Musk is holding X’s content hostage for a single AI: the only model allowed to learn from what millions of people posted in public is the one owned by the man who owns the platform. Imagine Reddit shutting every other AI out of fifteen years of threads its users wrote for free, and keeping them for a chatbot of its own. Nobody would call that protecting the data. It is keeping it for yourself, and it is unfair.
So: no. Public means public. A post somebody wrote on a public timeline, that a logged-out browser could load a year ago, is not a proprietary asset because the person who bought the building says so. XCrap reads what anybody could read and gives it back in a shape you can actually use. That is the whole argument, and we are not sorry about it.
None of which is a reason to be careless. Everything on the previous section still holds: nothing private, nothing kept, and an opt-out that is honoured the same day. Being against a paywall is not the same as being against the people behind it.
What it costs to run
A domain and a server, and that is the entire budget. There are no ads, no paid tier, no investors and nothing to upsell you later. It is covered by donations, and if it ever stops being covered the honest move is to say so rather than quietly add a paywall.
About the name
X, scrape, and the obvious third thing. It was funnier at two in the morning, and by then the domain was already bought.
