# Orbit Cards: why I made X headers out of the people you talk with > On X, the people you keep talking with are what make an account worth following, and none of them show up on your profile. So I made Orbit Cards, a small web app that reads your X once and turns those people into a header, a recap and a few cards worth posting. Source: https://karakabakov.com/posts/orbit-cards/ --- [← All posts](https://karakabakov.com/posts/) # Orbit Cards: why I made X headers out of the people you talk with [Gjorge Karakabakov](https://karakabakov.com/about/) October 20, 2026 - orbit-cards - x - twitter - indie - web-app 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](https://orbitcards.app/) 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. ![A Mosaic X header: a grid of profile photos with the closest people in the biggest tiles and the bottom-left corner left clear for the profile photo.](https://karakabakov.com/images/products/orbit-cards-header-mosaic.webp) 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. ![A pink recap card reading My last 30 days on X: 422 replies, 117 posts, 1.7M views and 66 people, with a row of faces under it.](https://karakabakov.com/images/products/orbit-cards-recap.webp) ## 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. ![A profile photo with a ring of eight small faces around it and the words My orbit, 8 favourites along the bottom.](https://karakabakov.com/images/products/orbit-cards-ring.webp) ## 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](https://orbitcards.app/), and there’s more about it on its [page here](https://karakabakov.com/orbit-cards/). ## Keep reading [![Three orange flames, the biggest with a pale yellow core, burning up a frosted white hillside on a peach field.](https://karakabakov.com/images/wildfire-lab-hero.webp) October 17, 2026 ### Wildfire Lab: I built a fire simulator to see how wildfires spread](https://karakabakov.com/posts/wildfire-lab/) [![A glowing database drum on a dark glass tile, with blue and violet light spilling out from behind it.](https://karakabakov.com/images/pocketbase.webp) January 14, 2024 ### Using PocketBase.io as your backend for your next project](https://karakabakov.com/posts/using-pocketbase-as-backend/) [← All posts](https://karakabakov.com/posts/) [Get in touch](https://karakabakov.com/contact/)