LunarCrush switches to pay-per-use credits: $1 per 1,000 requests across its API, MCP and CLI

What LunarCrush announced

LunarCrush, the social-data platform that measures how much people talk about coins and stocks on X, Reddit, YouTube and other networks, changed how developers pay for it on 28 October 2026. In a post on its official X account the company said a single monthly plan never suited the range of things people build with its data, from weekend scripts and trading bots to AI agents that check sentiment every hour. Its answer is metered billing: one dollar buys 1,000 requests, and the credits do not expire.

The launch image puts it even more bluntly: pay only for what you use, with no subscription required. A follow-up post in the same thread adds three details that matter for anyone deciding whether to switch. Only calls that succeed are charged. One credit balance covers every way of reaching the data. And every new account starts with 1,000 credits at no cost, which is enough to test a project before paying anything.

One balance for the API, MCP and CLI

LunarCrush offers its data through three doors, and the new credits open all of them. The API is the classic web interface a developer calls from code. MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is the standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT call outside tools directly, so a chatbot can ask LunarCrush for the latest sentiment on a coin. The CLI is a command-line tool for people who prefer typing queries in a terminal. LunarCrush says the same balance works across all three and across all 37 of its endpoints, so there is no separate meter for each access method.

That matters because the old model tied features to plan tiers. Under pay-per-use, the question becomes how many requests a project makes, not which tier unlocks which endpoint. A request that fails, for example because of a typo in a coin symbol, does not cost a credit.

The monthly plans are still listed

The monthly plans have not disappeared. When we checked LunarCrush's pricing page on 28 October, it still listed three subscriptions at $90, $300 and $900 a month, cheaper when billed yearly, plus custom Enterprise deals. Each plan has a per-minute and a daily cap: the entry plan allows 10 requests a minute and 2,000 a day, the top self-serve plan 500 a minute and 100,000 a day. According to the same page, a request over the cap gets a rate-limit error and is not billed. LunarCrush's announcement does not say whether pay-per-use accounts face their own rate limits, so builders planning heavy bursts should check their dashboard before relying on it.

What pay-per-use costs in practice

Some simple arithmetic shows who gains. At one dollar per 1,000 requests, each call costs a tenth of a cent. An AI agent that checks one coin every hour makes 24 calls a day, roughly 720 in a month, which costs about 72 cents, and the 1,000 free credits would cover more than a month of it. A bot that tracks 20 coins every hour makes about 14,400 calls a month, or about $14.40. Only at roughly 90,000 requests a month, around 3,000 a day, does metered spending reach the $90 price of the entry subscription, and that plan stops at 2,000 requests a day anyway.

Our take

For hobby projects and agents that call LunarCrush occasionally, this is a clear improvement: there is no monthly fee to justify, and unused credits carry over instead of resetting. Teams running steady, high-volume pipelines should still compare their real monthly request count with the subscription caps, because a fixed plan can work out cheaper at scale and may come with features the announcement does not mention for pay-per-use accounts. As always, social sentiment is one input among many, not a trading signal on its own.