LinkedIn limits explained: what HeyLead enforces, in numbers.
Last updated 24 September 2026
You connect a LinkedIn seat, and HeyLead sends on it under your name. This page says how much it will send, when it stops, and what it does when LinkedIn pushes back. Every cap here is a ceiling HeyLead enforces, not a volume LinkedIn promises. HeyLead is not affiliated with LinkedIn. It reaches LinkedIn through Unipile, which is also not affiliated.
Invitation ceilings per LinkedIn plan
The invitation ceiling belongs to the seat, not to your HeyLead plan. HeyLead reads the seat's plan from LinkedIn and enforces the matching ceiling. Your dashboard shows the seat's invitations against it.
| Your LinkedIn plan | A day | A week |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 20 | 100 |
| Premium | 168 | 320 |
| Sales Navigator | 168 | 320 |
The paid ceilings were measured on two seats on 16 September 2026: a Sales Navigator seat refused by LinkedIn at 177 a day and 337 a week, and a Premium seat never refused at 160 and 321. The ceiling is the measured number less 5%: 177 became 168, 337 became 320. Sales Navigator adds search filters and InMail, not invitations, so the two paid plans share one ceiling. Free was not measured and stays at 20 and 100: a fresh account is where LinkedIn's newcomer behaviour bites hardest.
LinkedIn's own rules are in the Terms.
How the day and the week reset
The day is the UTC calendar day: it resets at 00:00 UTC, wherever you are.
The week is a rolling window, not Monday to Sunday: HeyLead counts every invitation sent since 00:00 UTC seven days ago. An invitation sent on a Monday counts until the end of the following Monday and drops out at 00:00 UTC on the Tuesday.
HeyLead counts invitations by the moment they were sent, per seat, across every campaign and every workspace that sends on that seat. InMails and messages are not invitations and do not count. When either count reaches its ceiling, HeyLead plans no more invitations from that seat and carries on with everything else: opening messages, follow-ups and replies. It stops ahead of time because past the weekly ceiling LinkedIn accepts the request and silently discards it, so no error ever arrives.
What happens when LinkedIn pushes back
Invitations have a ceiling. Every other LinkedIn action is paced reactively: HeyLead attempts it and backs off when LinkedIn, through Unipile, answers with a rate-limit error: a 422 that reads "temporary provider limit".
The first refusal pauses that action on that seat for 5 minutes. Each further refusal doubles the pause: 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 minutes, then 6 hours, the longest it goes. A success shortens the pause by one step (from 6 hours to 240 minutes, then 160, and so on down), so the seat keeps what it learned.
The pause is per seat and per action: an invitation refusal pauses invitations, not follow-ups or replies. Two people sending on the same seat share one pause. The first time a refusal arms a pause on a seat, you get a notification naming the seat, the action, the minutes and when it resumes.
For an invitation, three things happen before the backoff:
- If the invitation carried a note and LinkedIn refused it, HeyLead sends it again without the note and remembers that this seat cannot send notes.
- If LinkedIn still refuses because too many invitations are pending, HeyLead withdraws the oldest pending invitation and tries once more. At most 15 such withdrawals a day per seat, and never for a "cannot resend yet" refusal.
- If the retry fails anyway, HeyLead stops withdrawing for 24 hours rather than spend one pending invitation per send. On 12 and 13 September 2026, 34 withdrawals on one seat bought nothing; that is why.
Pending invitations
Each campaign has a stale window, 21 days by default, and you can change it per campaign. After it, HeyLead marks an unanswered invitation as expired in its own records and moves on.
By default that is bookkeeping only: the invitation on LinkedIn stays. The campaign setting withdraw_stale_invites also withdraws it on LinkedIn,
and only while the campaign is active. Apart from that, HeyLead withdraws an invitation only to free a send slot, as above.
Profile reads
A seat may read at most 150 LinkedIn profiles in any rolling 24 hours, across every campaign that sends on it. Prospect discovery, job-change detection, the open-to-work check and profile lookups before a send all spend from it; a person looking someone up in the dashboard does not. When the 150 are spent, discovery waits. The window is rolling on purpose: a midnight reset would allow two days of reading in the two hours either side of it, which is exactly the burst LinkedIn notices.
The ceiling exists because on 8 September 2026 LinkedIn ended one seat's session and wrote that the account had accessed a high volume of profile data. That day had measured about 200 reads. The quiet hours below come from the same day.
InMail
An InMail is not an invitation. HeyLead reads the seat's InMail credit balance from LinkedIn, and an Open Profile member accepts an InMail without a credit. HeyLead sends at most 8 InMails a day per seat (UTC day). By default an invitation that sits unanswered for 14 days earns one InMail, when the seat has credits or the person is an Open Profile. InMail as the first touch is off unless you turn it on. Once LinkedIn has refused a seat's InMails, HeyLead stops trying and does not spend first touches on it.
Quiet hours and the sending window
| Rule | What HeyLead does |
|---|---|
| Quiet hours | No LinkedIn call at all between 22:00 and 08:00 in your time zone, for every campaign and every job. On unless you switch it off in Settings. |
| Sending window | Sends Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone by default. You can choose another window in Settings, or let a campaign ignore it. |
| Spacing | 20 to 40 minutes between invitations and 20 to 35 minutes between follow-up messages on a seat, at a random point in the range. |
Your time zone is the one you set with the quiet hours or the sending window, else the location on your LinkedIn profile, else London.
Restrictions
A restriction is LinkedIn's decision about your account, and HeyLead is not told why. What HeyLead sees is the seat's status through Unipile: OK; needs attention, which is a checkpoint or a credentials request; or disconnected.
- When the session is dead, every send is parked, not failed. A retry five minutes later would be the same refusal.
- You get a reconnect link and a notification: reconnect the account; sending is stopped until you do.
- Nothing is lost. Once the seat is back, the planner queues the parked work again.
The ceilings, the quiet hours and the read ceiling exist to make that day rarer. They do not make it impossible. LinkedIn's own rules are in the Terms.
Self-hosted quotas
Self-hosted free installs have monthly quotas: 50 invitations, 20 messages, 30 engagements, 1 active campaign, 3 ICP generations. The LinkedIn ceilings above still apply to the seat; the quotas sit underneath them. Details on the pricing page and in the self-hosted docs.
Questions people ask
Can I send 168 invitations a day?
168 a day and 320 a week is the ceiling HeyLead enforces on a Premium or Sales Navigator seat, not a volume LinkedIn promises. It is the measured ceiling of one mature paid seat less 5% (16 September 2026). A newer or smaller account may be refused sooner, and when it is, HeyLead backs off from 5 minutes to 6 hours.
When does the weekly invitation count reset?
It does not reset on a Monday. The week is a rolling window, not Monday to Sunday: HeyLead counts every invitation sent since 00:00 UTC seven days ago. An invitation sent on a Monday counts until the end of the following Monday and drops out at 00:00 UTC on the Tuesday. The day is the UTC calendar day and resets at 00:00 UTC.
What happens when LinkedIn refuses an invitation?
If the invitation carried a note, HeyLead sends it again without one and remembers that this seat cannot send notes. If LinkedIn still refuses because too many invitations are pending, HeyLead withdraws the oldest pending invitation and tries once more, at most 15 withdrawals a day per seat. If that does not free a send, it stops withdrawing for 24 hours. Then the backoff takes over: 5 minutes, doubling with each refusal, up to 6 hours.
Does HeyLead withdraw my pending invitations?
Not unless you switch it on. Each campaign has a stale window, 21 days by default, and you can change it per campaign, after which HeyLead marks an unanswered invitation as expired in its own records and moves on. The invitation on LinkedIn is withdrawn only when the campaign's withdraw_stale_invites setting is on, and only while the campaign is active. The one exception is the free-spot withdrawal above, which happens only when LinkedIn refuses a send for too many pending invitations.
What happens if LinkedIn restricts my account?
HeyLead is not told why. What it sees is the seat's status through Unipile: OK, needs attention (a checkpoint or a credentials request), or disconnected. When the session is dead, every send is parked rather than failed, you get a reconnect link and a notification that sending is stopped until you reconnect, and the planner queues the parked work again once the seat is back. LinkedIn's own rules are in the Terms.
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