On X, engagement costs more than followers

A thousand followers on X start at $0.8970. A thousand likes start at $0.9350. A thousand replies start at $4.7700. Followers are the cheapest of the three, which makes X unusual among the platforms we index.

On Instagram a like costs about a seventh of what a follower costs. On X a like costs slightly more than a follower, and a reply costs more than five times one. The pricing is telling you something about what is hard to produce on the platform.

Replies are expensive because they are writing

There are 11,331 reply services in our index against 26,089 follower services, and the reply services are priced at roughly five times the rate. A follow is a button. A like is a button. A reply is a block of text that has to exist, attach to a specific post, and not be identical to the forty other replies the same provider is delivering that minute.

Custom comment services cost more again than random ones, for the obvious reason. The random tier is drawn from a pool of generic lines, and anyone reading the thread can tell. The custom tier takes your text, which is why people buying for a product launch pay the premium.

Retweets sit between the two at $0.7717 per thousand across 9,930 services, which is slightly below the follower rate. A repost is still one button, so it prices like one.

Views cost nothing and mean nothing

Post views on X start at $0.0033 per thousand and video views at $0.0020, which puts both in the same bracket as Instagram views. There are 16,430 view services and 9,560 video view services in our index.

The view counter on X has been public on every post since 2022, so it is the number most visible to a casual reader and the easiest number to inflate. Two tenths of a cent buys a thousand of them. Anyone who has spent time on the platform has learned to read a post with 400,000 views and eleven likes correctly, which is the problem with buying the cheap metric: the ratio it creates is the tell.

Impressions are listed separately by many panels at $0.0063 per thousand. The distinction between a view and an impression differs by provider and often is not explained anywhere in the listing.

What the ratio should look like

If you are buying anything on X, the engagement to view ratio is the thing to protect. Real posts land in a fairly narrow band, and a post outside that band reads as purchased whether or not it was.

Buying views alone pushes you below the band, since the denominator grows while the numerator does not. Buying likes alone pushes you above it, which is the more conspicuous direction: a post with 2,000 likes and 3,000 views has never happened organically.

The least visible purchase is the one that keeps the shape of a normal post, which usually means spending on the expensive metrics rather than the cheap ones and accepting a smaller absolute number. This is the opposite of how most people approach it, because the cheap metric is where the big numbers are.

Followers on X are a long game

At $0.8970 per thousand, followers are affordable enough that buying them is common, and they do almost nothing for reach. X's timeline ranks by predicted engagement on the individual post, so an audience that never engages lowers the prediction for everything you post afterwards.

The account that gets reach on X is the one whose existing followers reliably reply and repost, which is why small accounts with active audiences outperform large accounts with dead ones on that platform more visibly than on any other. Adding ten thousand inert followers makes the engagement rate on every future post worse.

Monetisation requirements are the one place the follower number has a hard floor: the revenue sharing programme has a follower threshold and an impressions threshold, and the follower half is a gate rather than a ranking input. Buying past a gate and buying for reach are different purchases with different logic, and conflating them is how people end up with an account that cannot be grown back.

Traffic services

There are 7,571 services selling traffic from X at $0.1937 per thousand, meaning visits to an external site referred from the platform. These are priced about sixty times above a view because something has to load the destination page.

Whether that traffic does anything for you depends entirely on what the destination measures. It will show up in your analytics as referral sessions. It will not buy anything, and if you are optimising ad spend against on site conversion, it makes the numbers you are optimising against worse.

Check what you are buying against the rest of the market on SMMCompare before you order, particularly on reply and comment services where the gap between the custom and random tiers is large and the listing title does not always say which one you are getting.