How to Use This Tool
Type or paste your post. The count uses the platform's own weighting, so it will disagree with a plain character count — that disagreement is the point.
Links always cost 23
X rewrites every URL in a post to a t.co address of fixed length, so it charges the
fixed length regardless of what you typed. A seventy-character link costs 23. A fifteen-character link
also costs 23.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: running your URL through a shortener before posting saves you nothing and costs you a redirect hop, a dependency on the shortener staying alive, and a link that tells the reader nothing about where it goes. Post the full URL.
Emoji cost two, sometimes more
Most emoji are counted as two characters. Some are worse: emoji built by joining several code points together — family groups, skin tone variants, flags — can cost considerably more, because each component counts. A single family emoji can run to eleven characters of budget.
The breakdown panel shows what the emoji in your post are actually costing, which is usually more than people expect when they add a row of them at the end.
What does not count
- Attached images, videos and GIFs — they no longer consume characters.
- Quoted posts — the quoted post's own text is not charged to yours.
- @mentions at the start of a reply — these sit outside the counted text in a reply, though a mention in the middle of your sentence does count.
Writing to the limit
Two habits that survive the rules changing. Front-load: the first line is what appears in a timeline preview, so put the reason to stop scrolling there rather than at the end. Put the link last: a link in the middle interrupts the sentence and gains nothing, since it costs the same wherever it sits.
If a post runs over, the thread splitter below breaks it at sentence boundaries rather than mid-word, and keeps each part inside the limit including its numbering.
About the Premium limit
The longer limit exists for subscribers, but the first 280 characters are what appear before the "show more" fold. Everything past that is a click away, and most readers do not click. Treat the long limit as room for detail after you have already made the point, not as licence to bury the point.
