Thousands of X users who log into their accounts expecting to use a familiar dashboard are now greeting a blunt message: upgrade or lose access. On March 26, 2026, X limited X Pro to customers with the Premium+ subscription, priced at $40 per month, pulling the tool away from the millions who had been using it under the standard $8 Premium plan.
The move is remarkable for its abruptness. No notice was provided to X Pro users about the change and access was suddenly cut off, leading to multiple complaints on the social network. Users who paid for their subscriptions days or weeks prior, expecting access for the full billing cycle, found themselves locked out mid-term. Users on annual Premium plans are being forced to upgrade mid-cycle to keep access.
X Pro was known as TweetDeck before Elon Musk bought Twitter, and it was free to use. For years, TweetDeck was the standard tool for journalists, social media managers, and power users who needed to monitor multiple timelines simultaneously. The tool offered a popular interface for showing multiple timelines, feeds and lists in a single interface. After Musk's acquisition and the rebranding to X, the platform made TweetDeck a paid feature. Now it sits at the top of the pricing pyramid.
The price trajectory tells the story. In the span of three years, TweetDeck has gone from being completely free before Elon Musk's takeover to $8 per month to nearly $400 per year. For the professional users who depend on it most, the math no longer works. One user told support that cancelling the service entirely made more sense than paying five times what they had been paying for the same feature.
X's own terms offer little comfort to frustrated customers. X says features included in Premium "are subject to change at any time as we continue to improve the service". The company could argue it has played fairly by its own rules. But rules that allow unannounced mid-cycle feature removal protect the platform, not the customer. Fiscal responsibility runs both ways; individual paying subscribers deserve basic transparency about what they have paid for.
Nikita Bier, X's head of product, offered a partial explanation. Bier says the company plans to release a feature more powerful than X Pro within 1 to 2 weeks, and that X Pro would be reserved for users with "hyper-specific business workflows." The promise of something better is standard corporate language when you are removing something people valued. Whether a replacement arrives, and whether it actually serves the use cases that TweetDeck satisfied, remains to be seen.
There is a legitimate case that X, as a private platform, can restructure its pricing tiers however it chooses. The company needs revenue, and premium features that serve professional users are a rational place to chase it. Some users may be willing to pay $40 a month if they see sufficient value. But that case is weakened by the absence of warning. Users who bought a subscription last week expected to have access for 30 days. They received 24 hours, with the notice coming only when they tried to log in.
The opacity also matters in a broader context. X has been testing new monetisation models constantly since Musk's takeover, from charging new users fees to restricting features to paying accounts. Each change erodes a little more of the goodwill that builds sustainable user bases. Customers understand that platforms iterate; what corrodes trust is feeling like they are being moved on without explanation.
The underlying tension is real. X faces pressure to improve financial performance and cannot rely entirely on advertising. Subscription revenue is a legitimate path forward. But treating paying users as a captive audience, moving their features without notice and requiring them to spend five times as much to keep what they had, is a choice, not an inevitability. It is the kind of choice that eventually has consequences for platforms that make it too often.