Search for what an InMail costs and two of the top three results are posts complaining about a price jump. That is the wrong number to stare at. LinkedIn InMail cost is one InMail credit per message to someone you are not connected to, taken from the monthly allowance your paid LinkedIn plan includes, and a message to a member with an Open Profile spends no credit at all. In money, one InMail costs the plan price divided by the InMails you send. Divide the plan by the replies instead, and you have the number that matters.
So the useful question is not the sticker price. It is which of your prospects need an InMail at all. Below: what each kind of account gives you, how InMail works, what a credit is and how many you can send, and a worked example of 100 prospects reached three different ways.
If you want to try the cheaper route on your own list, you can run InMail and connection requests from one sequence in Oneprofile while you read.
One thing before the arithmetic. No message rescues the wrong list, and an InMail to the wrong person is the most expensive way to learn that. Picking who to write to comes first, and it lives upstream in finding the right people to message.
LinkedIn InMail cost by plan
You do not buy InMails one at a time on a normal LinkedIn account. You buy a plan, and the plan carries an allowance of InMail credits. That shifts the cost question from "what does one InMail cost" to "what does my plan cost per InMail I really send".
A free account has no InMail credits. It reaches strangers through a connection request, and messages them after they accept.
A paid plan, whether a Premium plan or a Sales Navigator seat, adds a monthly allowance of InMail credits. How many depends on the plan.
An Open Profile on the other side changes the math for any account: messaging that member spends no credit.
Extra credits can be bought on top of the allowance on some plans, Recruiter Lite among them. That add-on price is probably the LinkedIn InMail cost the posts at the top of this search are complaining about.
LinkedIn sets the allowance for each plan and publishes it, along with how the credits renew, on its own help pages about InMail credits. Read the current figure there, not in a blog post, this one included. The price posts at the top of this search are a decent reminder that LinkedIn's numbers move and a page written last year may not have moved with them.
Then run the division with your own figures:
The second line is the one that matters. A plan you bought for its search filters, sending eight InMails a month, makes each of those eight very expensive. The credits you never spent did no work that month.
A small tangent on why the price drifts the way it does. By Wikipedia's account of LinkedIn's business, as of 2015 most of its revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. InMail is that access, sold one stranger at a time. We would not bet on it getting cheaper.
How does InMail work in LinkedIn?
An ordinary LinkedIn message reaches only your 1st-degree connections. Writing to a stranger takes an Open Profile on their side or an InMail credit on yours. InMail is a message with its own subject line, delivered to someone who never accepted you.
Each way of saying something to a person on LinkedIn has its own reach and its own length:
What you send | Who it reaches | How long LinkedIn lets it be |
|---|---|---|
Connection request note | Anyone LinkedIn offers Connect on | 300 characters, 200 from a free account |
Message | Your 1st-degree connections | 8,000 characters |
InMail | Anyone not connected, one credit each | 200-character subject, 1,900-character body |
InMail to an Open Profile | Members who can be messaged free | The same, and no credit spent |
The note line hides a catch. LinkedIn caps how many connection requests an account can send with a note and never says how many. Past the cap it asks for Premium. That cap is part of why InMail looks attractive, and also why a request sent with no note is the better default.
What is an InMail credit on LinkedIn, and how many can you send?
An InMail credit is the unit of that allowance: one credit, one InMail to a member without an Open Profile. It comes with the plan, and the InMail you send is what spends it.
The question people type, how many InMail can I send in LinkedIn, has two answers that both apply:
Your balance. It decides how many InMails can go to closed profiles. Open Profile members do not draw on it.
Your pace. LinkedIn polices volume on its own terms, and it does not publish the line. Spacing sends across the week is safer than spending a balance in one morning.
The other version, how many InMail credits do I get with LinkedIn Premium, depends on which Premium plan you are on. Check your own balance before you plan a campaign around it.
In Oneprofile, the pace part is a setting. Limits on the sender's LinkedIn tab sets a daily and a weekly number for each action, and messages and InMails share one Send message limit, 40 a day by default. Daily limits reset at midnight in the sender's timezone, and a weekly one counts today and the six days before it. Lower is safer.
LinkedIn InMail cost against connect-then-message: a worked example
Say you have 100 heads of revenue operations at companies like cleardue.example, and you are connected to none of them. Here is what each LinkedIn step costs in Oneprofile, next to what LinkedIn itself takes:
Step | Oneprofile credits | What it spends on LinkedIn |
|---|---|---|
View profile | 0.1 | Nothing; it also reads whether they have an Open Profile |
Send connection request | 0.2 | Nothing; LinkedIn polices the volume |
Send message | 0.2 | Nothing; connections only |
Send InMail | 0.3 | One InMail credit, none for an Open Profile |
Withdraw connection request | 0.1 | Nothing |
Like latest post | 0.1 | Nothing |
Now the scenario. Assume 15 of the 100 have an Open Profile, and 30 of the other 85 accept a request within the 14 days a request waits by default. Those two figures are illustrations, not benchmarks; your list will differ.
Plan | Oneprofile credits | InMail credits spent |
|---|---|---|
A. Send InMail to all 100 | 30 | 85 |
B. View all 100, InMail the 15 Open Profiles, request the other 85, message the 30 who accept | 37.5 | 0 |
C. Plan B, then withdraw the 55 unanswered requests and InMail those 55 | 59.5 | 55 |
Plan A is the fastest: at the default 40 messages and InMails a day, the whole list is reached in three days. It also spends 85 InMail credits on a single list, and every one of them goes out before you know who would have accepted a plain request.
Plan B spends no InMail credits and reaches 45 people. The other 55 are simply not reached, which is fine if they were marginal and a real loss if they were the accounts you most wanted.
Plan C is the one we would run. It reaches all 100, spends 30 fewer InMail credits than plan A, and the InMails it does send go only to people who left a request unanswered, so each credit goes where the free route has already failed.
The price is time. At the default 15 connection requests a day and 80 a week, the 85 requests take eight days to go out. Each then waits its 14 days, so the last holdouts get their InMail about three weeks in. On the Team plan, where $20 a month buys 1,000 credits, plan C's 59.5 Oneprofile credits are a small slice of one month.
When the LinkedIn InMail cost is worth paying
Plan C has the general rule inside it. Spend an InMail where a connection request has already failed or never had a chance, and nowhere else. In practice that means:
Senior people who do not accept strangers. A request sits pending for two weeks and tells you so.
A reason to write that expires. A new role or a funding round this week reads very differently in a month, so a 14-day wait costs more than a credit.
Open Profiles, always. No credit is spent, so there is nothing to weigh.
Where it is not worth paying: a long list of people who accept requests readily, and a second InMail to someone who ignored the first. One unanswered InMail is a signal. Two is the same signal, bought twice. This is the same lesson cold email teaches, just with a meter on it.
"Playing the numbers game in outreach is expensive and wasteful. A better tool lifts your reply rate far more than sending more ever will."
Utku Zihnioglu, CEO of Oneprofile
Build the connect-first plan as one sequence
LinkedIn steps in Oneprofile run in the sender's own browser through the Oneprofile extension, on the LinkedIn account already signed in there. Send InMail spends that account's own InMail credits on top of the step's 0.3 credits.
In Sequences, click New and choose Start a blank sequence. On the Builder tab, point at the gap between two steps, click Add a step here, and choose View profile under LinkedIn.
Add Has an open profile? from Then check…. On its Yes path, add Send InMail.
On the No path, add Send connection request. It starts on No note, which keeps you clear of the hidden note cap. The Not accepted branch reads "Not accepted in 14 days", and you can set anything from 1 to 90 days.
Under Connected, add Send message. Under Not accepted, the request already carries Withdraw connection request; add Send InMail after it for the holdouts.
Switch the messages and InMails to Written by the agent and give each a prompt. The agent writes each one from that contact's research, and the LinkedIn preview tab shows it against a real contact for no credits.
Leave the sender on Manual run to begin with, so every step waits in Tasks for Approve. The editor header estimates the whole sequence before anything sends.
A reply on any step lands in one inbox and stops that contact's remaining steps. Answer it quickly: research in Harvard Business Review on online sales leads found most companies respond far too slowly, and an InMail reply is about as warm as cold outreach gets. On a LinkedIn thread the inbox's send button reads Queue on LinkedIn, and your answer goes from your own account the next time your browser is online.
Before you renew a LinkedIn plan for its InMail allowance, count last month's InMails and the replies they got, then run the two divisions above. If the number makes you wince, connect first and save InMail for the people who never accept.
