X Pro abruptly gets pricier and more restricted, but Nikita Bier says a more powerful product is coming soon

X has quietly moved X Pro, the multi-column dashboard formerly known as TweetDeck, behind its Premium+ paywall, effective March 26. That means the tool now costs $40 per month or about $395 per year, up from the $8/month Premium plan it was previously bundled with. No warning was given to existing subscribers.

To put that in perspective: TweetDeck was completely free before Elon Musk’s takeover. Now, in the span of a few years, it has gone from free to $8/month to nearly $400 per year. As highlighted by accounts like Culture Crave, users on annual Premium plans are being forced to upgrade mid-cycle to keep access.

Some users found out the hard way. Nadine Babu, a Premium subscriber, said she was locked out of X Pro despite her plan listing it as an included feature. When she reached out to Grok for support, the bot confirmed the change had gone live but noted X’s own Creator Hub table had not yet updated to reflect it. “You first took something that was free and charged us, now you’re charging us 4 times as much,” she wrote, adding that creators on X get paid less than on any other major social platform.

Others pointed out the mid-cycle forced upgrade feels pretty questionable. One user called it outright “scammy.” Another said they cancelled their Premium subscription entirely.

More interestingly, before the sudden lockout, some Premium users even got a notice claiming their access to X Pro was temporarily blocked to investigate “fraud misuse by Premium tier subscribers.”

X’s head of product Nikita Bier did respond, though not exactly with an apology. In a post, he said what X is launching “in the next week or two will be much more powerful than XPro,” and that X Pro is being kept only for users with “hyper-specific business workflows.”

Still, not everyone is thrilled about this. One user replied, saying, “I do not care what you are developing. I bought and paid for TweetDeck, so I would like access to it.” 

It is worth noting this is part of a broader pattern of X tightening what is available without a paid upgrade. Ask Grok went Premium-only earlier this month, and Grok Imagine was similarly paywalled just last week. Musk also unveiled a $10/month SuperGrok Lite plan two days ago, seemingly as a lower-cost entry point into the AI features stack.

Nikita Bier’s mystery product announcement is now the main thing keeping some users from fully writing off the change. Earlier this week, we reported that X tapped Benji Taylor as design lead and that Bier called an upcoming Grok algorithm change the biggest yet, so there does appear to be something in the works. Whether it justifies a near-$400 annual price tag for a tool people used to get for free is a different question.

Update 27/03/26 – 01:13 pm (IST): Added details about users getting a fraud notice before the lockout.

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