LinkedIn Profile Scraper: How They Work and What 1,000 Profiles Cost

TL;DR

Prices are unit costs per 1,000 profiles from each vendor's own pages, named in the notes under the table.

• Bright Data: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, the lowest meter here, with no LinkedIn account of yours involved.
• Vayne: $2.90 per 1,000 on Freelance, in batches of up to 2,000.
• Scrapfly: $3.75 to $4.50 per 1,000, but you get HTML back and write the parser.
• HarvestAPI: $4.00 down to $2.00 per 1,000 main profiles, depending on the top-up you buy.
• Apify (harvestapi actor): $4.00 per 1,000 profiles, $10.00 with email search.
• Scrapingdog: $10.00 per 1,000 on Lite, $4.50 on Standard, double for protected profiles.
• WizLeads: 4 credits per profile on Enrich Profile, from a Sales Navigator ID rather than a profile URL.
• Captain Data: $65.98 per 1,000 credits at its entry tier, and its docs and pricing page disagree on 1 credit or 2 per profile.
• PhantomBuster and joeyism/linkedin_scraper: run on your own session, so they are not priced per profile.

Part of what those prices pay for is getting each page to arrive. We sent four plain requests to four public LinkedIn profile URLs from a cloud server, without logging in. Three came back HTTP 200. One came back HTTP 999, LinkedIn's own non-standard refusal code, and the same URL answered 200 about a minute later.

This post covers what a profile gives up without a login, why "no cookies" still costs money, eight LinkedIn profile scrapers priced per 1,000 profiles, two that run on your own session, and where the limits and the rules sit.

What a logged-out profile actually returns

A logged-out profile holds more than the sign-in prompt suggests. The three pages that came back 200 carried the work history in the HTML, with titles, dates and durations readable. On Reid Hoffman's page, the Experience section showed dated roles, such as one listed from Jan 2025 to Present with a length of 1 year 10 months. The page also held Education, Volunteer Experience, a Skills list, Publications, Honors and Awards and Recommendations received.

The sign-in modal hides this on screen, but the text is in the page source. Nothing was masked with asterisks on any of the three.

Not every request gets through. The 999 body was a 1,530-byte page, tiny next to the 600 to 930 KB of a real profile.

Four public profiles on one day show that a plain request can get a full profile page. They do not show what you would get at 1,000 URLs, from another network or on another day.

No page held an email. Most tools below that return one next to a profile sell it as a second step priced on its own, like the email option on HarvestAPI.

Why "no cookies" has a price tag

You can scrape LinkedIn profiles without an account when you only need a few. Our four requests did it. At volume, LinkedIn profile scraping means a vendor has to get each page past refusals like our 999, retry the failures and parse what comes back, and that work is what you pay for.

Several tools below advertise no cookies and no account, which means none of yours. Bright Data's page says retries, rendering and unblocking sit inside its one price per record.

The other route runs on your own account. Unipile and Linked API both bill per connected account or per seat, with no per-profile meter, and your account then carries LinkedIn's limits and the risk of a restriction. We leave them off the priced list for that reason.

Eight tools, priced per 1,000 profiles

The criterion is the same for all eight: the vendor's own meter for 1,000 profiles, at the lowest published tier that covers them, in order of that entry price. Seven take a profile URL or the ID in it, and WizLeads takes a Sales Navigator member ID. A monthly minimum can make your real invoice larger than the per-1,000 figure.

Seven of the eight work as a LinkedIn profile scraper API that returns parsed fields, and Scrapfly returns raw HTML. Cost is one column. What comes back, and whose session the request runs on, matter as much.

Each figure comes from the vendor's own page: Bright Data's LinkedIn Profiles page, Vayne's pricing page, Scrapfly's pricing page and billing docs, HarvestAPI's pricing section, the harvestapi actor's Apify listing, Scrapingdog's pricing page, WizLeads' API page, and Captain Data's pricing page and credit docs.

Bright Data

Bright Data's Web Scraper API takes LinkedIn profile URLs. On its LinkedIn Profiles page, pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 records, and a record is one extracted item, such as one profile.

The free tier is 5,000 records a month with no card, and the Scale plan is $499 a month for 384,000 records, then $1.30 per 1,000. So 1,000 profiles cost $1.50 at list price. Bright Data's pricing page banner offers 25% off Web Scraper APIs for 3 months with code APIS25, while its coupons page says 6 months, and the prices in this post are list prices without it.

Your LinkedIn account is not involved, and the page states no specific usage limits. The field list is less clear. The page header names experience, education, interests, posts, followers and connections, while the scraper card lower on the same page lists ID, name, location, position, About, posts and current company, "and more". Run one real profile before you plan around a field.

Vayne

Vayne takes profile or company URLs in batches of up to 2,000 and returns 30+ fields per row, including headline, summary, current title and company, connections, followers, skills and languages. On Vayne's pricing page, the Free plan is 200 leads a month and Freelance is $29 a month for 10,000 leads. The profile scraper is included on every plan.

Vayne's profile scraper page prices 10,000 profiles at $29 a month, the Freelance price, so by Vayne's own figure a profile URL counts as one lead: $2.90 per 1,000 on Freelance and $1.59 on the $159 Expand plan for 100,000 leads.

Vayne says each URL is fetched on its own infrastructure, so your account is never involved, with no daily limit. Work emails are a separate purchase: its enrichment credits are not part of any plan.

Scrapfly

Scrapfly is a general scraping API, so you send a profile URL and get HTML back. Scrapfly's pricing page lists the Discovery plan at $30 a month for 200,000 credits, $0.15 per 1,000, with failed requests free and 1,000 free credits on signup.

Its billing docs set one anti-bot option at 25 credits and browser rendering at 5 more. No page states what a LinkedIn profile costs, so the arithmetic gives $3.75 per 1,000 at 25 credits and $4.50 at 30. The 25 is that option's price alone. Scrapfly's docs and its own LinkedIn tutorial examples, which combine rendering with that option, give 30, so plan on $4.50.

No account of yours is involved. Every field is your parsing job, and you rebuild the parser when LinkedIn changes its markup.

HarvestAPI

HarvestAPI sells an API of its own, separate from its Apify actor. On its pricing section, a main profile costs $0.004 on the Free and Starter packages, $0.0032 on Basic, $0.0023 on Pro and $0.002 on Business. That is $4.00 down to $2.00 per 1,000. A full profile with more fields runs $6.40 down to $3.20, and a profile with email search is $0.02 on Starter.

Credits are pay as you go, with no subscription. The $1 free credit buys 250 main profiles at $0.004, although the Free card itself says "up to 500", and the $2.00 rate needs the $780 Business top-up, so a buyer starting small pays $4.00.

Apify

Apify is a marketplace, and the profile actor to know is HarvestAPI's. The listing charges $0.004 per profile on Free and Bronze, $0.0036 on Silver and $0.0032 on Gold, and $0.01 with email search on every plan. That is $4.00 per 1,000 profiles on Free, $3.20 on Gold, or $10.00 with email. It states that no cookies or account are required.

The free plan's $5 of prepaid usage covers at most 1,250 profiles, and the listing limits free-plan users to 50 runs in total. Email search is adaptive: the actor does not charge for the search when a profile is too thin to run it.

Other profile actors on Apify set their own prices and free-plan limits, so read the listing of any actor you swap in.

Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog's Profile Scraper API takes a profile ID such as rbranson, not a full URL. Its pricing page states 50 credits per request, and its Profile Scraper API page says a protected profile costs 100.

Lite is $40 a month for 200,000 credits, which is $10.00 per 1,000 profiles. Standard is $90 for 1,000,000 credits, or $4.50. Pro is $200 for 3,000,000, or $3.33. Protected profiles double those numbers to $20.00 on Lite and $9.00 on Standard.

Failed, blocked and timed-out requests are refunded. Free signup gives 100 credits, which is two profiles at 50.

Scrapingdog says it uses no cookies or LinkedIn account and that its users can pull profiles in the millions a day.

WizLeads

WizLeads starts from Sales Navigator. Its Sales Navigator scraper takes a Sales Navigator search URL, or a saved list URL with your account connected, and costs 1 credit per profile connected or 2 credits account-less, which runs without your LinkedIn account. On the $39 Freelancer plan, which holds 10,000 credits, that is $3.90 or $7.80 per 1,000.

Its Enrich Profile API endpoint takes Sales Navigator member IDs (the URN form, such as ACwAA...), up to 25 a call, and returns positions, education, skills, certifications and contact information. It charges 4 credits per profile that returns data, which is $15.60 per 1,000 on Freelancer and $9.90 on the $99 Agency plan. A public username such as williamhgates is rejected without charge, and the IDs come from a WizLeads people export.

If you hold a list of ordinary profile URLs, WizLeads cannot take it, and one of the tools above fits better. Without Sales Navigator access you cannot produce the search URL either. Connected mode runs on your own account, where LinkedIn's help centre warns that third-party scraping software risks restriction.

Captain Data

Captain Data's Enrich People call takes a LinkedIn profile URL. Its pricing page lists a complete profile at 1 credit per record. Its credit docs say 1 credit, or 2 with full_enrich, and full_enrich still returns only the 5 most recent experience entries, 2 skills and 2 education entries, with no licences or certifications. So a complete profile is 2 credits and still capped.

In USD, the 2,500-credit minimum is $165 a month at $65.98 per 1,000 credits. That is $65.98 per 1,000 profiles at 1 credit and $131.96 at 2.

At 20,000 credits the rate drops to $32.98 per 1,000 credits, or $660 a month, so $32.98 or $65.96. A free API key carries 100 credits, and unused credits do not roll over. Its docs ask only for an API key and do not say whose LinkedIn session runs the call.

Captain Data is the dearest of these eight at entry volume, and its 1-or-2 credit rule is worth testing on one profile before you commit.

Two tools that run on your own LinkedIn session

PhantomBuster and an open-source library each work as a profile scraper for LinkedIn that runs on your logged-in session, so they sit outside the per-1,000 ranking. You pay in subscription hours or nothing, and the account at risk is yours.

PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster's LinkedIn Profile Scraper phantom needs your LinkedIn cookie and a list of profile URLs, and takes one automation slot. On PhantomBuster's pricing page, Start is $69 a month for 20 execution hours, or $56 a month on annual billing. Grow is $159 and Scale $439 monthly.

The page meters hours, not rows. It claims 1,000 leads in 30 minutes without email discovery, which at $69 for 20 hours works out to about $1.73 per 1,000. The phantom page also recommends at most 1,500 profiles a day.

The phantom reads only the two most recent positions and skips pictures and endorsements. Its input table says 44 data points and a workflow example on the same page says 47. The email column needs a Dropcontact, Hunter or Snov.io key, or PhantomBuster's own email credits.

joeyism/linkedin_scraper

joeyism/linkedin_scraper is a free Python library with 4,619 stars and 1,008 forks. Version 3.1.2 reached PyPI on 10 April 2026. It is async, built on Playwright, and its README says LinkedIn requires authentication, so you create a session file from your own logged-in browser first.

That makes the cost $0 per 1,000 and the account risk entirely yours. The licence is also contested. GitHub's licence field and the LICENSE file say GPL-3.0, while the README badge and the PyPI classifier say Apache 2.0. The two put different duties on anything you ship, so settle that before you build on it.

Reconciling the daily limits, which look like they contradict each other

Read across the vendors' pages and you get a spread of ceilings, each stated as if it were the answer.

LinkedIn publishes no threshold of its own, so every row is a vendor's claim or our own small test.

Our reading is that they do not contradict each other, because each states the ceiling for a different identity. An anonymous request is limited by its address. Your own account is limited by what LinkedIn tolerates from one member, which the 300 to 400 and 1,500 figures try to put a number on. A vendor that runs its own infrastructure says its ceiling is high, or does not state one.

So the choice is whose identity takes the daily ceiling. That is also why the 999 matters in code: treat it as a failed fetch, never as an empty profile. The tiny body is easy to catch with a size check.

The rules, and the vendor that stopped existing

The Don'ts in LinkedIn's User Agreement bar using someone else's account, including copying cookies, and bar software that tries to "scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data".

LinkedIn's robots.txt says automated access without its express permission is strictly prohibited, and it disallows the whole site for named AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. LinkedIn says the agreement "applies to Members and Visitors", so it treats scraping as a contract question before a technical one, whether or not you hold an account. None of this is legal advice.

One vendor is missing from older lists. Proxycurl was a popular LinkedIn data API, LinkedIn sued it in January 2025, and its founder announced the shutdown on 4 July 2025, in a post on the nubela.co blog. A vendor-side API can end on a court's timetable, so keep your exports and avoid a pipeline whose only data path is one vendor.

Picking one

Start from what you hold.

• A list of profile URLs, lowest price: Bright Data at $1.50 per 1,000 records, or Vayne at $2.90. Test one real profile first: Bright Data names its fields two ways.
• A list of profile URLs, richer rows or email: HarvestAPI, on its own API or the Apify actor, which sells email search at $0.01 a profile on Apify.
• A parser and engineers: Scrapfly, at $4.50 per 1,000 if you plan on 30 credits.
• A Sales Navigator search, not a list: WizLeads.
• A free LinkedIn profile scraper: Bright Data's 5,000 free records a month, Vayne's 200 leads, Scrapfly's 1,000 credits, or Apify's $5 of usage. joeyism's library is free too, and your account is the risk. Scrapingdog's free signup is two profiles.

If you have no list yet, the search is the hard part, and no per-profile price here will decide it. If the work runs on your own session, assume the account can be restricted.