You want the accounts following a public X profile — to size up a competitor's audience, build a list of people in your niche, or check how much two follower bases overlap.
You do not need an X developer account for this, and you do not need to be approved for anything. You pass a handle and get follower profiles back, 200 per call, with a cursor to keep going. That matters because X's own API gates follower reads behind paid tiers with monthly read caps, and the cheap tier does not include them at all.
The endpoint
X / Twitter
Followers / Following
GET /v1/x/followers-following
Follower and following lists for an X account as paginated profile summaries.
3 credits per call · $4.50 per 1,000 calls · failed calls never charged
Full endpoint referenceMake the call
Put your key in FASTFETCHZ_KEY. The target below is a real one — it works as written.
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/x/followers-following?target=elonmusk" \
-H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"What comes back
Trimmed to the fields that matter. The full payload carries more.
{
"success": true,
"service": { "platform": "X", "name": "Followers / Following" },
"credits_charged": 3,
"data": {
"followers": [
{
"id": "44196397",
"userName": "SpaceX",
"name": "SpaceX",
"isBlueVerified": true,
"followers": 34210442,
"following": 12,
"description": "SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world's most advanced rockets and spacecraft",
"location": "Hawthorne, CA",
"createdAt": "2008-06-15T18:32:12.000Z",
"profilePicture": "https://pbs.example.com/profile_images/spacex.jpg"
}
]
},
"cursor": "1934572810293847561"
}Getting more than one page
One call returns up to 200 follower profiles plus a cursor. Send the cursor back to get the next 200, and keep going until the response comes back with no cursor.
Pages are serial — there is no way to jump to page 500 — so a big export is a long single-threaded job. Persist the cursor next to your progress so a crash resumes instead of restarting and paying twice.
# Page 1 — 200 followers
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/x/followers-following?target=elonmusk" \
-H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"
# -> { "data": { "followers": [ ... ] }, "cursor": "1934572810293847561" }
# Page 2 — pass the cursor straight back
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/x/followers-following?target=elonmusk&cursor=1934572810293847561" \
-H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"What it costs
1,000,000 followers ÷ 200 per call = 5,000 calls
5,000 calls × 3 credits = 15,000 credits
$43.50
Priced at the Starter pack rate: 10,000 credits for $29.00. Larger packs cost less per credit.
Be realistic about very large accounts
@elonmusk has over 220 million followers. At 200 per call that is about 1.1 million calls — a job that runs for days and costs four figures. The million-follower figure above is already a large export; scale from it rather than from a number you hope is cheaper.
What works: sample. Twenty thousand followers is 100 calls and is a statistically useful slice of almost any audience. Full exports make sense for accounts up to a few hundred thousand followers. Above that, decide what question you are answering before you buy the whole list — usually a sample answers it.
What you cannot get
Protected accounts return nothing — there is no public follower list to read. Suspended and deleted handles fail, and a failed call is never charged, so a stale list of handles only costs you the ones that still exist.
Follower entries are profile summaries: handle, display name, bio, verification, counts, location and avatar. They do not include email addresses or phone numbers — X does not publish those, and no API can invent them. Ordering is X's own and is not stable between runs, so treat the export as a set, not a ranking.
Following, not followers
The same endpoint reads the other direction. Who an account follows is usually the more interesting list: it is chosen deliberately, it is far smaller, and for a competitor it maps out who they watch.
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/x/followers-following?target=elonmusk&type=following" \
-H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"