Orbit Cards: why I made X headers out of the people you talk with

Spend a few months on X and you end up with a small group of people you keep running into. They reply to your posts, you reply to theirs, and after a while you feel like you know them a bit.

None of that shows up on a profile. You get a header, a photo and a bio, and the people who make the account worth following aren’t in any of them.

I wanted a header made of those people. That’s most of what Orbit Cards is.

What is Orbit Cards?

Orbit Cards is a web app. You connect your X account, it reads it once, and it works out who you actually talk with: the people you reply to, quote, mention and repost, and the people who do that to you, ranked by how much and how recently.

Then it draws them. An X header at 1500×500 with your closest people in the biggest spots, a ring around your own profile photo, a recap of your month, a card for your #1 person, a thank-you card for new followers, and a Time Machine that puts your X next to how it looked a year ago. You download the picture and post it yourself.

The faces in these pictures are made up. Orbit Cards ships with a demo account of AI-generated people so you can see every design before you connect anything.

Where did it come from?

These cards started inside Orbit+, the X companion in the Orbit Mac app. Orbit+ already keeps track of who you talk with, so drawing them onto a picture was a small step.

The problem was the Mac app. Most people on X will never install a Mac app to get a new header, and I don’t blame them. So I took the cards out and put them on a website that anyone with an X account can open.

Why only read once?

Because reading someone’s X isn’t free, and I didn’t want any surprise costs, for me or for the person paying.

One read gets your profile, your last 30 days of posts, replies and mentions, a pick of your followers and a sample of the year before. Every card is drawn from that, with no more calls to X however many times you shuffle. A header, a recap and a ring all come from the same read.

Why doesn’t it post for you?

I didn’t want it to. Orbit Cards asks X for read access only. It never posts, follows, likes or changes your profile. Post on X copies your card and opens X’s own post box, and you decide whether to send it.

It also doesn’t hold on to your X sign-in. On a card pack it’s deleted right after the read. On Monthly it’s kept for the read on the 1st and deleted when you cancel.

What does it cost?

A card pack is $9 once: one read and 30 days to make as many cards as you like. Monthly is $4 a month and reads your X again on the 1st, so your recap and your header keep up with who you’re talking to. There’s no free tier. Every read costs real money, so every plan costs a few dollars.

Every card carries a small “Made with Orbit Cards” mark. I expect that’s how most people will find it.

What I’d like to happen

I’d like to scroll X and see headers full of faces, and know they’re the people that person actually talks to. Making one takes about a minute.

It’s at orbitcards.app, and there’s more about it on its page here.