BuzzyX has eleven free tools that need no account: a shadowban test, a bio generator, bio templates, a bio guide, a username checker, a header maker, a font generator, a character counter, a thread splitter, a post-to-image maker and an engagement rate calculator. People ask why the shadowban test makes them do the checking, and why the username checker opens x.com instead of just telling them. This post is the reasoning, from our decision log on 2026-10-18.
The constraint
Every X API call costs us money, per call. A paid BuzzyX account has daily caps sized so that the plan covers its own cost. A free tool used by an anonymous visitor has no plan behind it, and worse, no visitor: half the traffic to a free tool page is crawlers.
So the rule for free tools is simple. They never spend money. They run in your browser, and if they need anything from X, it has to be bounded so tightly that a bot cannot hurt us. Anything that would need an uncapped X call, or an AI call, for someone who has not signed in does not get built that way.
Why the shadowban test is guided
An automatic shadowban checker has to search X for your posts, check whether your handle appears in search suggestions, and look at how your replies are ranked. Each of those is either a billed API call for every visitor, or scraping x.com, which breaks X's rules. On top of that, the API's search does not always match what the X app shows, so an "automatic" result can be wrong in both directions.
Our test is guided instead. You type your handle, and it builds the four checks that matter: search ban, search suggestion ban, reply deboosting, and account status. For each one it opens the exact x.com page to look at, tells you what to look for from another account or a logged-out window, and you report what you saw. From your answers it gives a verdict and explains what to do about it.
It is more work for you than pressing one button. It is also honest, free, and based on what X actually shows people, which is the thing you care about.
Why the username checker links out
The username checker validates X's rules first: 4 to 15 characters, letters, numbers and underscores, nothing reserved. That part is instant and runs in your browser. For whether a handle is taken, it can check X through the capped lookup described below, and it links to the handle on x.com and on Reddit so you can see for yourself. Reddit is linked rather than checked because Reddit's availability endpoint refuses non-browser clients, and we are not going to pretend to be a browser.
When a handle is taken, the tool suggests close alternatives that pass the rules, and you can check each of those too.
The one exception, and how it is capped
After the tools shipped, I wanted them to feel more real: a real photo and bio loaded into the bio tools, a definite "taken" or "suspended" from the username checker, a real answer to the account-status check in the shadowban test. All of that needs exactly one X call, the profile read by username, which costs about $0.01 when the account exists.
So that one call is allowed, with four fences around it:
- It only ever runs when you press the button. Never on a page view, so crawlers never trigger it.
- Results are cached per handle, so the second person to look up the same account pays nothing. A found profile is cached for a day, a missing one for six hours.
- There is a global cap of 150 billed lookups a day across every visitor, and a cap of 10 per visitor. Visitors are counted by a salted daily hash of the address, not by anything stored about you.
- The lookup is booked before the call is made, in a single database write that fails if the cap is reached, so parallel requests cannot all sneak through. If X does not answer, the booking is given back.
Worst case, if every slot is used every day, that is $1.50 a day, about $45 a month. Every lookup is recorded on our internal spend page next to everything else, so I can see it. That is the entire budget the free tools can ever spend, and it is written into the project's rules as the single exception to "no X spend without a paid account".
What we said no to
The same day, I looked at the SuperX-style pages that show a public profile with its recent posts at a URL like /creators/handle, indexable by Google. They bring traffic. We did not build them, for three reasons from the decision log: they would publish other people's posts that we cannot keep in sync with deletions, each page would cost about $0.05 more than a profile read, and because they are indexable, crawlers would be the ones spending the money.
The free tools exist to be useful to a person who is there, on purpose, pressing a button. That is the line.
What this costs you, the reader
Nothing, and that is the point, but it is worth being clear about what you give up. The guided shadowban test takes a few minutes instead of a few seconds. The username checker asks you to look at x.com yourself when the live lookup is out of budget for the day. The bio generator writes from rules, not from a model, so it is predictable rather than clever. Each of those is a trade I would make again: a slower tool that is free, honest and always available beats a fast one that quietly breaks when a bot finds it.
Try them
- Shadowban test: the four checks, with the x.com pages opened for you.
- Username checker: X's rules, a live check, and alternatives.
- Bio generator: load your profile, pick an archetype, get eight bios that fit 160 characters.
None of them need a BuzzyX account, and none of them ever will. The product behind them is a paid X growth workspace with a 7-day free trial, $0 today with a card, $29 a month after. The tools are not a funnel trick. They are the parts of the product that could be free without costing anyone anything, so they are.
BuzzyX · X growth workspace
Grow on X with posts that sound like you.
Compose in your voice, schedule the week, find posts worth replying to and read real analytics from the X API. $29/mo after the trial, everything included.