Creator Tools

The Like button on X is about to be worth money. Elon Musk announced on Sunday, October 25, 2026, that X is adding a way to send money with a single gesture: press and hold the Like button on a post, and one dollar goes to its author through X Money. “We’re adding long press on like to send someone $1 via X Money,” Musk wrote in a post on the platform.

Making short video for X just got much cheaper for anyone willing to work through an API. xAI has added a Lite tier to its Grok Imagine video models, and the headline number is hard to miss: two cents for every second of finished video at the lowest resolution. For creators who test several versions of a clip before posting one, that pricing changes the math of experimenting.

If you have connected a scheduling tool to X in the past few weeks, you have probably met the warning. The authorization screen tells you, in X's own words, that "This app is not affiliated with X and is requesting sensitive permissions," and it asks you to tick a box labeled "I trust this app" before you can continue. It looks like a security alert. According to reporting published on Friday by FutureTweets, it is not a glitch, and it is not going away.

Long-form writers on X no longer have to sit in the web composer to publish an Article. According to X's API changelog, the company added new endpoints on October 3, 2026, for drafting and publishing Articles through the X API — a quiet change that opens the platform's richest writing format to outside tools, publishing platforms, and automation for the first time.

Posting on X increasingly comes down to what happens right after a post goes live. Three tracked changes to the platform's feed ranking between September 30 and October 7, 2026 have tightened the window for a new post to earn wider distribution, raised who can qualify for an early boost, and cut the credit given to posts that have not yet proved themselves.

A scheduling tool that built its name on Twitter threads no longer publishes to X at all. Hypefury, launched in 2019 by co-founders Samy Dindane and Yannick Veys and described by the company as the first scheduler built for Twitter threads, now lists five supported platforms on its pricing page: Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. X is not among them.

Going live on X no longer has to start and end inside the X app. The platform has launched an updated livestream API, rebuilt from the ground up, that lets third-party video platforms facilitate X streams and gives creators far more control over how a broadcast is set up, run and moderated.

X is testing a simpler way to pay video creators: show up consistently, post original vertical video, and collect a guaranteed bonus. The new pilot is called the Video Kickstart Bonus, and invited creators who meet its posting target can receive 3,000 dollars, with no requirement to hit a set number of views or engagements.

Getting paid on X works differently now. The platform retired its Creator Revenue Sharing programme on September 7, 2026, and began rolling out its replacement, Original Content Rewards, from September 8. Existing members could apply for the new programme through Creator Studio, and the change redraws both who can earn and what kind of posts actually generate a payout.

X wants creators to treat posting as a business, and it runs two main programs to pay them: revenue sharing and Subscriptions. They work very differently, and most creators who earn on the platform use one or both. Here is how each stands today.