Social media API changes in 2026: a living reference

We covered this in full in our dedicated Buffer migration post, but the short version belongs here too: Buffer restricted third-party access to its original public API years ago, and on May 27, 2026 it launched a new, strongly-typed GraphQL Public API with an MCP server and CLI, available on every plan. In parallel, Buffer published a retirement notice for the legacy REST API — brownouts on November 11 and December 9, 2026, with a full shutdown on February 1, 2027, and new client registration on the legacy API already closed. What we could not confirm from Buffer's own materials, as of our last check, is whether the new API's OAuth flow yet supports third-party multi-tenant access (a SaaS product connecting many different customers' Buffer accounts) rather than just personal-account automation — that detail is worth verifying directly before committing engineering time to it.

Checked directly against Meta's own Graph API changelog: v25.0 released February 18, 2026 (with availability through July 29, 2028), and v26.0 followed on July 29, 2026. v20.0, released back in May 2024, expires on September 24, 2026 — a reminder that Meta's versions run on roughly a two-year availability window, and an integration pinned to an old version silently falls back rather than erroring outright once it expires, which is its own operational risk if nobody's watching for it.

Separately, third-party reporting (not something we could independently confirm on Meta's own changelog page at check time) describes 47 commerce endpoints — the ones letting third-party platforms manage orders placed through Facebook and Instagram Shops — being removed across all remaining supported Graph API versions on October 27, 2026. If your integration touches Meta commerce endpoints, verify this directly against Meta's current documentation rather than relying on this summary alone.

Multiple independent trackers describe X moving away from its old tiered subscription pricing (Basic, Pro, Enterprise) to a pay-per-use credit model as the default for new developers, reported effective February 6, 2026 — no free tier, and Basic/Pro no longer open to new signups, with existing subscribers grandfathered on the old tiers. We flag this one as third-party-sourced rather than pulled directly from X's own pricing page, so treat the exact date as reported-but-not-directly- verified by us. What we could confirm directly is a follow-on pricing update: X's own developer community forum posted an announcement — titled "X API Pricing Update: Owned Reads Now $0.001 + Other Changes Effective April 20, 2026" — setting owned-resource reads at $0.001 each, effective that date. If your integration bills against X API usage, the current pay-per-use rate card is worth pulling fresh rather than trusting any cached figure, this post's included.

Pulled directly from LinkedIn's own developer documentation on Microsoft Learn: Marketing Version 202508 (Marketing API, August 2025) is scheduled to sunset on August 17, 2026, with LinkedIn recommending migration to the current versioned APIs ahead of that date to avoid disruption. LinkedIn also separately raised its Community Management API development-tier rate limits (per-app and per-member call caps both increased) — a rare instance of a platform change that loosens rather than tightens a constraint, worth noting because most of the entries on this page go the other direction.

Treat this as a starting point for what to check, not a substitute for checking it: platform changelogs move faster than any third-party summary can track in real time, and the entries flagged as third-party-sourced above specifically deserve a direct look at the platform's own current documentation before you plan around them. If you're trying to estimate the ongoing cost of keeping direct integrations current against changes like these, see our cost-of-building estimate — this kind of version churn is exactly what that post's maintenance-cost section is describing.