Twitter (X) cold DM statistics, each with its source and date

Every number below carries its source and the date we read it, so you can quote a line on its own. Where a figure is ours, the line says so.

What X itself publishes about DMs

X's own help pages give the figures below, and they are the only DM numbers X stands behind. We read each page again on 5 October 2026.

• Message requests. A first message to someone who does not follow you is capped at 7 a day on Free, 35 on Premium, 75 on Premium Plus and 500 on Premium Business.
• The window. X says "in a 24-hour period" and names no reset time, so the window rolls.
• All DMs. An account can send at most 500 DMs a day, replies included. Premium Business is the one plan that gets more, though X names no number.
• The old ceiling. That total was 1,000 a day until December 2022.
• Hourly DM limits. X publishes none. Its half-hour limits apply to posts.
• Accounts. One person may run up to ten accounts, each for a different purpose.

All of these sit under one rule that covers every sender and every tool, ours included: "You may not send unsolicited Direct Messages in a bulk or automated manner". The caps by plan, and what each plan costs, are worked through in the X DM limit guide.

What 46 sending accounts did in three months

Our own logs cover every workspace on our software from 2 July to 5 October 2026. In that time, 46 X accounts in 14 campaigns sent 37,487 DMs. The first two rows are the ones that surprise people:

Two findings run against common advice. Sending the same few versions to thousands of leads was normal. The usual stop was the daily cap: on over half the days an account got error 226, it had just sent 33 to 37 first messages. The 23% depends on the list, and collecting only profiles with open DMs avoids most of it.

From 2 July to 5 October 2026, none of the 46 X accounts Xsender ran was suspended. 9 had a temporary phone or puzzle check. That is a record, not a promise.

The numbers from our 21 day study

Our study of 30 accounts measured what X does at the cap. It found the next first message went through 24.7 to 27 hours after a batch began and that all 23 accounts stopping at exactly 35 a day got error 226. The X DM Limit Study explains how we measured each one and links the totals as a CSV file.

A separate audit of our founder's workspace, in the week before 3 September 2026, found that 11 of 662 retried sends got through.

How often do X cold DMs get replies?

The largest public dataset puts the median campaign at 0.57%. It comes from Xreacher, a rival cold DM tool, which counted 43,672,794 first DMs sent through its product in the 180 days to 3 July 2026. Any answer counts as a reply. The rows run from the highest rate down:

Across our users, rates run from about 1% to 8% depending on the script. The list matters as much: in our own outreach in September 2026, people who commented on "drop your startup link" posts replied with interest 3.0% of the time, against 0.3% for followers of big marketing accounts. Cold DM reply rates, measured and claimed explains why vendor blogs quote far higher numbers.

Numbers online that X contradicts

Several pages that rank for X DM limits still quote figures from before X published its table. On 5 October 2026, OpenTweet, XAutoDM and Businessho still said Premium gets about 1,000 DMs a day. Businessho also quoted about 150 an hour, which X never publishes. The X DM limit, set against these claims puts each one next to X's own wording.

If you would rather track these counts for your own accounts, Xsender keeps them per account and per campaign.

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