LinkedIn API pricing: official access vs per-call providers

LinkedIn API pricing has two answers. LinkedIn's official API publishes no price list: its open permissions are free but only cover sign-in and posting for the member who signed in, and other profile data sits behind partner programs that need LinkedIn's approval. Per-call providers sell profile and company lookups by the record.

So the question to ask first is not "how much" but "which door". If your agent needs to read public profiles or company pages by URL, for research, enrichment or a lead list, the official API will not sell you that on a price list. A per-call provider will. If your app needs members to sign in or post as themselves, the official API does it and charges nothing. This post walks through both doors, quotes the vendor prices we could read on their own pages, and shows looot's live prices for the same jobs.

Official LinkedIn API pricing: what each access level costs

LinkedIn's developer docs split access into open permissions, which any developer adds from the Developer Portal, and partner programs, which LinkedIn must approve. Neither the docs nor LinkedIn's product catalog states a price for any product. What you pay for is the approval, not a per-call fee you can look up.

Sources: LinkedIn's getting access page and LinkedIn's product catalog, both read 2026-10-13. The product catalog lists the products and states no price.

Can you read someone else's profile through the official API?

Not with the open permissions. The open profile permission returns the name, headline and photo of the member who signed in to your app, nobody else. LinkedIn lists matched public profile information under the Sales Navigator Application Platform, which is open only to approved partners. If your agent works through a list of profile URLs that are not your users, the official route needs a partnership first.

That is the gap per-call providers fill. They read public LinkedIn pages and return them as JSON, and they bill per record or per call. They are not LinkedIn, and LinkedIn does not endorse them. Check their terms and your own use before you build on one.

LinkedIn API pricing from per-call providers

A per-call provider answers one question: how much for one profile? Some publish a price per 1,000 records, some sell a plan with an allowance, and some do both. Here is one vendor's public price, read on its own page.

Bright Data's page also says you pay only for success and can set a spend limit. Prices on vendor pages change, so open the source link before you budget.

looot sells the same jobs per call from one prepaid balance, through several providers. The table below reads the cheapest live price for each job from the looot catalog when the page loads.

The cheapest provider is not the only one worth a look. Profiles differ in what comes back: some providers return full work history, education and skills, others a light record with name, position and company. This table shows each provider's live price for one profile.

The ranking of these providers, with what each one returns, is on the best LinkedIn API page.

How do you work out the cost of 1,000 profiles?

Multiply the price per call by 1,000, then adjust for three things a price list hides.

1. Misses. A profile that is private, deleted or mistyped returns nothing. Ask whether a miss is billed. If it is, your cost per good profile is the price divided by the share of calls that return a profile.
2. Depth. A full profile with work history costs the same per call as a light one on some providers and more on others. Price the record you need, not the cheapest record on offer.
3. Retries. A call that times out and is retried costs twice. Test on 20 of your own URLs before you run 1,000.

The same arithmetic for email lookups is in what 1,000 lookups cost.

Official API or per-call provider: which fits your job?

Pick by the job, not by the price, because only one of the two routes can do most jobs.

For the agent route end to end, inputs and outputs included, see the LinkedIn scraper API use case. Everything looot can read from LinkedIn, posts and company people included, is on the LinkedIn platform page.

Run it with an agent

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or any agent that can read a skill file. It prices before it spends and stops after three profiles.

What this post does not cover

• Legal advice. Reading public profile pages through a third party is not the same as the official API. Read LinkedIn's terms and the provider's terms for your use.
• Private data. looot does not log in to LinkedIn as you and does not read private accounts or messages.
• Scheduled refreshes. Re-reading a list of profiles on a timer needs scheduled runs, not available yet. Your agent runs a lookup when you ask.
• Free credit. looot has no free trial credit, you top up a balance first.

Last checked 2026-10-13. Vendor prices were read on that date from the pages linked above. looot prices in the tables are read from the live catalog when the page loads.