Free LinkedIn API in 2026: What Is Free and What Is Not

Type “free LinkedIn API” into Google and the honest answer is a partial yes. LinkedIn does run a free API, and any developer can switch it on. The catch is what it covers: the member who signs in to your app, and nobody else.

We read LinkedIn's developer pages, its legal terms and every vendor's pricing page on 2026-10-23, then did the maths from them. Nothing here comes from running anyone's product, so there are no speed or success-rate numbers. Where a page printed no figure we write “not verified.” Serpent sells one of the options below, so the arithmetic is shown; its profile call starts at $0.50 per 1,000.

The options at a glance (read 2026-10-23)

One row per option. Each paid rate is in the unit that vendor bills, so read the second column before you compare the fourth. Rates are for one public profile lookup unless the row says otherwise.

What LinkedIn's official API gives you free

LinkedIn's developer docs live on Microsoft Learn. The page called Getting Access to LinkedIn APIs (last updated 2026-06-03) opens with the rule that matters: “Open Permissions are the only permissions that are available to all developers without special approval.” Everything else, it says, needs approval from LinkedIn.

The open list is short. There are three permissions in two products:

• Sign In with LinkedIn using OpenID Connect. The profile permission returns the authenticated member's name, headline and photo, and email returns their primary email address.
• Share on LinkedIn. The w_member_social permission lets your app post, comment and like on behalf of the authenticated member.

Sign In: your user, not anyone else

The Sign In with LinkedIn page describes what your app gets back: a lite profile with an identifier, full name, given and family name, picture URL and locale. Email and its verified flag are optional and may be absent.

That is a login button with some profile data attached. It is not a way to look up a candidate, a prospect or a competitor.

Share: posting, with a daily cap

The Share on LinkedIn page shows how to publish text, links, images and video for a member. Its rate-limit table lists 150 requests per member and 100,000 per application a day, counted in UTC. That suits a scheduling feature, not data collection, because the permission writes content. We found no price on either page.

Even the free route has eligibility rules

The LinkedIn API Terms of Use (last revised 2022-12-13) set criteria for the self-serve program. Your app must not use content for advertising, must not be expected to have more than 100,000 lifetime users, and must not “rely on access to the APIs as a fundamental aspect of your business.” Otherwise LinkedIn points you to a Vetted API Program or a Partner Program.

A business whose main job is selling LinkedIn data does not fit that last test.

What it does not give you

Most people want to look up a profile from a URL, pull company details or search job listings. We found none of these among the open permissions. They sit behind LinkedIn's programs, each with its own gate.

• Marketing. Advertising API permissions “must be approved.” The Marketing API access page (updated 2026-10-19) says Audience Insights and Media Planning are restricted, and the Company Intelligence API “is not currently accepting new applications.” Restricted requests are “evaluated on a case-by-case basis with no fixed timeline.”
• Development tiers have caps. The Community Management API starts at 500 calls per app and 100 per member in 24 hours. Upgrading is at LinkedIn's discretion.
• Sales. Sales Navigator permissions require approval as a Sales Navigator Application Platform partner. One of them, r_sales_nav_profiles, covers “matched, publicly available member profile information” for approved partners.
• Talent and Learning. Talent integrations go through a partner application. Learning access is for Partner Program members and organizations with LinkedIn Learning site licenses, per its request-access page.
• Compliance. Listed “for reference purposes only. Access is closed and may not be requested.”

Marketing APIs are about ad accounts and your own company pages, and the profile permissions read the authenticated member. Partner programs are applications with no published price and no promised answer. None of this gives an ordinary developer a free lookup of someone else's public profile, which is the gap paid data APIs fill.

Check the terms before you build

Read LinkedIn’s API Terms of Use and User Agreement, and ask your own counsel before you build on any data source. This is not legal advice. Our LinkedIn legality guide and the official API comparison go deeper.

The near-free LinkedIn data APIs, one by one

These return LinkedIn-style profile, company or job data as JSON over a plain HTTP call. Each entry names what it bills. Serpent comes first because, on the numbers we read, its per-profile rate is the lowest. The comparison table above lets you check that order yourself.

1. Serpent API

• Free: A free account gets 10 free calls, shared across all services, and every LinkedIn endpoint can spend them. You also get one free demo run a day on the LinkedIn API page without signing up. That is small; Bright Data's 5,000 records go further for testing.
• Paid: A public profile lookup is $0.50 per 1,000 calls on Default. One deposit of $100 moves new credit to $0.45 (Growth), and one deposit of $500 or $1,000 to $0.35 (Scale and Enterprise). Company, full profile and name search are $1.00, $0.90 and $0.70; jobs and single job match the profile rate. The pricing page has every row.
• Posts: Priced by depth: 10 posts is $0.001 a call on Default, 50 posts $0.0034.
• Commitment: The first deposit is $10 minimum, which buys 20,000 Default profile calls by our arithmetic. There is no subscription, and deposited credits do not expire. Promotional bonus credits do, after 30 days.
• What you get: Seven endpoints under /api/linkedin/: profile, profile/full, company, jobs, job, posts and search. A profile returns name, headline, location, follower count and current company; full profile adds the summary, experience and education. A company returns industry, size band, a numeric employee count, founded year, headquarters and website. A job returns title, company, posted date, description, applicant count and salary when listed. It needs no LinkedIn account, cookies or OAuth, only the Serpent key. The API docs list every field.
• Watch out: Profile data is best-effort and varies by what the person has made public, so absent fields come back empty or omitted. On full profile, skills and languages are not populated. Name search finds a strong top match, not an exhaustive list, and posts are recently indexed public posts, not a full archive. The docs list no email or phone fields. Default allows 100 requests a minute and 10,000 a day.

Cheapest? On profiles, yes among the pages we read. $0.50 on Default is below every per-profile rate we read elsewhere: $1.30 at Bright Data (on a $499 plan), $1.36 at Scrapingdog (on a $30,000 plan) and $2.00 at the cheapest Apify actors we opened. Three caveats. Apify has many actors, its “from” prices fall on paid Apify plans, and a $1.20 listing showed in search results that we could not open. Units also differ, so compare what one unit returns.

2. Bright Data

Bright Data's LinkedIn scraper page lists profile, people search, company, jobs and posts collectors, plus followers, ads and groups. The page offers 5,000 records a month free with no card, and says unused free credits do not roll over. After that it is $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $499 a month for 384,000 records and then $1.30 per 1,000. It does not define a “record” for a search page, so confirm whether one job card counts as one. See our Bright Data LinkedIn pricing guide.

3. Apify actors

Apify is a marketplace, so the price depends on the actor. Apify's pricing page says the Free plan includes $5 of usage a month with no card. We opened four actor pages. One profile actor lists $2.00 per 1,000 profiles, another lists “from $2.00,” and the HarvestAPI actor lists from $4.00, or $10 with email search. For jobs, one actor lists $0.30 per 1,000 delivered jobs and another $5.00.

Two cautions. Each actor is run by an individual developer, and the cheaper ones we opened show a few hundred users at most, against 85,084 for HarvestAPI's profile actor. HarvestAPI's company actor prints “from $3.00” in its header and “$4 per 1k” in its text. Our Apify LinkedIn pricing guide covers how plan tiers change the rate.

4. Scrapingdog

Its LinkedIn scraper API page says each profile request costs 50 credits, or 100 if the profile is protected. The free plan has 100 credits, which is two profiles. On the pricing page the Lite plan is $40 for 200,000 credits, or 4,000 profiles, which is $10.00 per 1,000 by our division. The $30,000 Nova Pro plan has 1.1 billion credits, about $1.36 per 1,000.

5. Coresignal

Coresignal sells monthly plans from $49 for 2,500 credits to $5,000 for 10 million. A core employee or company record costs 10 credits, a full record 20, and a job posting 1. By our division a core profile is $196 per 1,000 on Mini and $5.00 on Elite. It lists a free tier and a 7-day trial without a clear amount. See our Coresignal pricing guide.

6. Enrich Layer, NinjaPear, People Data Labs, ScrapIn and Linked API

Enrich Layer sells credits: $10 buys 100 ($0.10 each) and $1,000 buys 46,297 ($0.0216 each), and a people lookup costs 1 to 3 credits per person found. NinjaPear, from the team behind Proxycurl, charges 3 credits for a person profile and shows one credit price, $0.009 on its $1,899-a-month plan. It offers a 3-day trial with 10 credits. Neither page says where its data comes from.

People Data Labs has 100 credits a month free with contact data hidden, and a Pro plan from $98 a month. It does not say where its data comes from, so we did not count it as a LinkedIn lookup. ScrapIn lists no free credits, a $30 seven-day trial and pay as you go from $500 for 12 months, with no unit price.

Linked API charges $49 or $74 per seat a month after a 7-day trial, and its page says one seat is one LinkedIn account, so it works through an account of your own. It is a different product, and we left it out of the cost table. We could not read the pricing page for the Fresh LinkedIn Profile Data API on RapidAPI, so it is not verified and not covered. For more vendors and units, see our best LinkedIn data APIs comparison and the Proxycurl alternatives guide.

What free really costs you

Time, and a data gap

The free official route needs an app, an OAuth flow and a consent screen, then returns one person's own data. If your job is enriching a list of leads, you build all that and still have nothing on the people you care about.

Approval risk and reliability

Partner programs are applications judged case by case, so plan as if the answer might be no, or late. Free trials and marketplace actors come with little support, and Proxycurl closed on 2025-07-04. Whatever you pick, put a thin adapter between your code and the vendor's responses so a closure is a one-file change.

Cost at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M lookups

This is arithmetic from the published rates above, per month, for one public profile each. We ignored free allowances, tax and extras, and used the cheapest plan that covers the volume. LinkedIn's own free API cannot do this job, so it has no row.

How to read it

• The Serpent tier rows assume you made the single qualifying deposit for that tier. Credits do not expire.
• Scrapingdog's rows use Lite ($40), Standard ($90), Premium ($350) and Corporate Plus ($2,500). One million profiles needs 50 million credits. Coresignal's rows use Starter ($199), Growth ($1,000), Premium ($1,500) and Elite ($5,000), the smallest plans whose credits cover 10,000, 100,000, 1 million and 10 million credits.
• Bright Data's $1,299.80 is $499 plus 616,000 records at $1.30 per 1,000. At 10,000 and 100,000 pay as you go is cheaper than the plan.
• Plan vendors cost the same whether you use all the credits or not, so their 1,000-lookup rows look expensive. We left out Enrich Layer, NinjaPear and People Data Labs because their credits per profile vary or their data source is not stated.

The same maths for job listings

Jobs are the unit trap. Serpent bills a jobs call, which returns a page of job cards (the docs example shows 10), while Apify and Bright Data bill per job. This table assumes 10 cards per page and is arithmetic, not a measurement.

If a page returns fewer than 10 cards, Serpent's cost per job rises in proportion. Per call, $0.50 is higher than the $0.30 Apify price per job, so compare on the same unit. Volume also meets rate limits: Default allows 10,000 calls a day, so a million lookups a month, about 33,000 a day, needs the Growth band (50,000 a day) or $500 in total deposits (100,000 a day).

How to choose

• You want “Log in with LinkedIn” or to post for your own users. Use the official free API. It is made for that, within the eligibility rules above.
• You need profiles, companies or jobs for people who never signed in to your app. Skip the official free API and use a data API. Serpent is the lowest per-profile rate we read, from $0.50 per 1,000 on Default.
• You want the biggest free trial. Bright Data's 5,000 records or Apify's $5 monthly credit go further than our 10 calls.
• You need emails, funding or deep enrichment. Serpent lists no email or phone fields. Compare Coresignal, Enrich Layer and NinjaPear.
• You are not sure whether you need profiles or companies. Our company or profile API guide and company lookup cost guide help you pick the entity first.
• You need other platforms too. See the free Instagram API guide and the free Google search API guide.

Quick start and migration

A profile lookup is a single GET request. This one is from the API docs:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/linkedin/profile?username=williamhgates" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

And a jobs search in Python. Filters come from the docs, and the filters block in the response lists the ones that were applied:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/linkedin/jobs",
    params={
        "keywords": "software engineer",
        "location": "United States",
        "date_posted": "past_week",
        "remote": "remote,hybrid",
        "sort": "recent",
    },
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
resp.raise_for_status()
data = resp.json()["data"]
print(data["filters"])
for job in data["jobs"]:
    print(job["job_posted_date"], job["job_title"], "|", job["company_name"], "|", job["location"])

Try it in the playground first if you want to see the JSON. Our guide to getting LinkedIn profile data from an API covers the profile fields, and the job board tutorial uses the jobs endpoints.

What to know when you move from another vendor

• Same idea, different names. You send a profile or company URL, or a username or slug, and get JSON back wrapped as { "success": true, "data": ... }. Field names differ by vendor, so map them in one adapter file.
• Spell filters right. A jobs filter value the API does not recognise is ignored, not rejected, and the call is billed the same. Check the filters echo before trusting the results.
• Company slugs. A company confidence of low means the slug resolved to a different company page than you asked for. In jobs, company_id takes numeric IDs only.

Limits and unknowns

• We did not test anything. Every competitor figure is from its published page on 2026-10-23. Prices and allowances change, so treat the numbers as dated.
• Pages we could not read. RapidAPI's Fresh LinkedIn Profile Data pricing, and a $1.20 Apify listing that returned not found.
• Units and free tiers. Bright Data does not define a record, Enrich Layer prices a range of credits per lookup, and we could not confirm each free allowance applies to its LinkedIn endpoint in every account.
• Data quality. We did not compare the fields each vendor returns for the same profiles, so a low rate does not prove equal coverage.
• Our interest. Serpent sells one of these options and we wrote the post, so redo any sum yourself from the linked pages.

FAQ

Is the LinkedIn API free?

Partly. LinkedIn's official API is free to self-serve developers for Sign In with LinkedIn and Share on LinkedIn, and both work only for the member who signs in. Looking up other people's profiles, companies or jobs is not in that open set and needs partner approval or a paid data API.

How do I get LinkedIn API access?

Create an app in the LinkedIn Developer Portal and add the Sign In or Share product from the Products tab. Marketing, Sales Navigator, Talent and Learning access need approval or a partnership, and Compliance is closed. LinkedIn says restricted requests are judged case by case with no fixed timeline.

Can I get any LinkedIn profile through the official API?

We found no open permission that looks up another person's profile by URL. The open permissions return the signed-in member's own name, headline, photo and email, or let that member post. Anything wider sits in approval-gated programs, so most teams use a paid LinkedIn data API instead.

Is there a free alternative to Proxycurl?

Proxycurl shut down on 4 July 2025, and we found no free replacement at volume. Free trials exist: Bright Data gives 5,000 records a month, Apify $5 of credit a month, Scrapingdog 100 credits and Serpent 10 calls. After that they are pay-as-you-go or plans, so budget for a paid tier.

Do I need to check LinkedIn's terms before using a data API?

Yes. LinkedIn publishes API Terms and a User Agreement that cover its data. Whether a given use is lawful depends on your facts and where you are, so read the terms and ask your own counsel before you build. This is not legal advice.

What is the cheapest LinkedIn data API?

Among the pages we read, Serpent has the lowest per-profile rate: $0.50 per 1,000 on Default and $0.35 on Scale, against $1.30 to $10.00 at Bright Data and Scrapingdog and $2.00 to $4.00 at Apify actors. Units differ by vendor, and other actors we did not read may undercut it.

Sources read on 2026-10-23

• Microsoft Learn: Getting Access to LinkedIn APIs
• Microsoft Learn: Sign In with LinkedIn using OpenID Connect
• Microsoft Learn: Share on LinkedIn
• Microsoft Learn: Marketing API increasing access
• Microsoft Learn: LinkedIn Learning API request access
• LinkedIn API Terms of Use
• LinkedIn User Agreement
• Nubela: Goodbye Proxycurl (shutdown date)
• Bright Data: LinkedIn scraper
• Coresignal: pricing
• People Data Labs: person pricing
• Apify: platform pricing
• Apify: LinkedIn Profile Scraper (dataweave)
• Apify: LinkedIn Profile scraper (gopalakrishnan)
• Apify: LinkedIn Profile Scraper (HarvestAPI)
• Apify: LinkedIn Company actor (HarvestAPI)
• Apify: LinkedIn Jobs Scraper (meka.im)
• Apify: LinkedIn Jobs Scraper (apimaestro)
• Scrapingdog: LinkedIn scraper API
• Scrapingdog: pricing
• Enrich Layer: pricing
• NinjaPear: pricing
• ScrapIn: pricing
• Linked API: pricing

Related reading on Serpent: best LinkedIn data APIs, Proxycurl alternatives, SERP APIs with no minimum and a free tier.