The short answer.
An InMail reaches anyone on LinkedIn without a connection, costs one credit from a monthly allowance, and the credit comes back if they reply within 90 days, so in practice you are only charged for the InMails that get ignored. A regular message is free but only works with people who have already accepted your connection request, and each request costs one unit of a weekly invitation quota that LinkedIn does not publish and that you cannot buy your way past.
See how Occura runs outreach on dedicated accountsThe three things people are actually comparing.
If you are job hunting, InMail is rarely the answer. If you are prospecting at volume, connection requests should be your default and InMail is what you spend when the quota runs out. The rest of this page shows the arithmetic.
The usual comparison has two things in it. There are three, and conflating them is why the advice you find is confused.
| InMail | Connection request + note | Message to a 1st-degree connection | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who you can reach | 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree and out of network | Anyone | Existing connections only |
| Cash cost | 1 credit, refunded on reply within 90 days | Free | Free |
| Quota cost | Your monthly credit allowance | 1 unit of the weekly invitation limit | None |
| Subject line | Up to 200 characters | None | None |
| Body limit | 1,900 or 2,000 characters (see below) | 300 characters for the note | Long-form |
| Plan required | Premium or Sales Navigator. Basic accounts cannot send InMail. | Any | Any |
| What it buys you afterwards | One message. No ongoing channel unless they reply. | A permanent free channel and feed visibility, if accepted | The channel you already have |
An accepted connection request is not a message, it is an asset: a permanent, free, long-form channel plus your posts appearing in that person's feed indefinitely. An InMail is a single shot that expires on delivery. Comparing them as if they were the same unit is the core error running through this whole topic.
LinkedIn's own documentation contradicts itself.
A small thing, but it tells you how much of what you read has been checked.
LinkedIn's InMail character limits page says the body is capped at 1,900 characters. LinkedIn's Send an InMail Message page, updated more recently, says 2,000. Both are live LinkedIn help pages.
Subject line is 200 characters on both pages.
Write to 1,900 and the disagreement stops mattering. But it is worth knowing that on this topic, LinkedIn itself is not a single consistent source.
What an InMail really costs.
Credits per month, and how far they stack:
| Plan | Credits per month | Maximum accumulation |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Career | 5 | 15 |
| Premium Business | 15 | 45 |
| Sales Navigator (Core, Advanced, Advanced Plus) | 50 | 150 |
| Recruiter Lite | 30 | 120 |
New credits arrive on the first day of your billing cycle. Unused credits accumulate up to the cap and then stop accruing. Cancel your subscription and the balance goes to zero.
You cannot buy more. LinkedIn states plainly that it is not possible to purchase additional InMail credits outside the monthly allotment.
And now the rule that changes the whole calculation. From LinkedIn's credits documentation:
Every InMail message that is accepted/declined or responded to directly within 90 days of it being sent is credited back.
A quick reply counts. A decline counts. So a credit is consumed only when your InMail produces nothing at all. You are not paying to send. You are paying for silence.
The obvious conclusion: the effective cost of InMail is inversely proportional to how good your message is. A team with a 40% response rate is spending 60% of face value. A team spraying generic InMails is paying full price on nearly every send.
What a connection request really costs.
Zero dollars, and one unit of the scarcest resource on the platform.
LinkedIn does not publish the weekly invitation cap. It is widely observed at somewhere around 100 to 200, varying with account age, acceptance rate and standing, but that is vendor observation, not documentation. What LinkedIn does confirm, on its invitation-restrictions page, is that you “can't buy or acquire more invitations while you've been restricted, or otherwise.” No plan raises it. Sales Navigator does not raise it.
So the quota is fixed, non-transferable and non-purchasable. In any campaign run at volume it is the binding constraint, and every request you spend on someone who was never going to accept is capacity you cannot get back.
The note is capped at 300 characters.
Cost per conversation: the comparison worth running.
Both channels are usually described as “free versus paid”. That framing is useless because it compares a cash price to no price and stops. The decision an operator actually makes is cost per conversation, and the two channels pay in different currencies.
InMail. If r is your reply rate, then out of 100 InMails you get 100r conversations and consume 100(1 − r) credits, since replies refund. At Sales Navigator Core pricing of roughly $120 a month for 50 credits, a credit runs about $2.40 at face value.
The curve is steep. Message quality does not just improve results, it changes the unit cost by a factor of four.
Connection requests. The cash cost is zero, so the real price is opportunity cost: each request is one unit of a weekly budget you cannot extend. The conversion is two-stage: acceptance, then reply.
The crossover. Connection requests are cheaper in every sense until you hit the weekly ceiling. Past it, they are not cheaper, they are simply unavailable, and at that point InMail stops being the expensive option and becomes the only option. That is the honest case for InMail: it is how you buy capacity past a wall that money cannot otherwise move.
Open Profile: the free InMail worth checking for.
Premium subscribers can turn on Open Profile. When they do, any member can message them without spending an InMail credit.
Part of your target list may be reachable for free, long-form, right now. It is worth checking on any list where the deal size justifies InMail at all, before you spend a credit.
What LinkedIn's own response-rate data does and does not say.
You will see figures like “InMails under 400 characters get 22% better response rates” quoted as evidence that InMail beats connection requests. Three problems with that.
They are relative, not absolute. The 22% is measured against the average across all InMails. LinkedIn does not publish the base rate, so the figure tells you nothing about how InMail performs in absolute terms.
They are from recruiting, not sales. The source is LinkedIn's talent blog, and the population is recruiters messaging candidates. The best-performing segment in that data is candidates with the Open To Work badge, which has no sales equivalent.
They are from 2022.
What the data does support, and it is genuinely useful: shorter is better, individually written beats bulk by a wide margin, and Saturday is the worst day to send.
LinkedIn has never published a comparison of InMail response rates against connection-request response rates. Anyone telling you one beats the other with a number is not citing LinkedIn, because there is nothing to cite.
How to decide, in three situations.
You are job hunting. Skip InMail. Check whether the hiring manager has Open Profile, and if so message them for free. Otherwise send a connection request with a 300-character note. Spending a Premium Career credit, of which you get five a month, on a cold hiring manager is the worst rate on this page.
You are a founder sending fewer than 20 messages a month. Connection requests, always. You are nowhere near the weekly ceiling, so the quota is not scarce for you and there is no reason to pay cash for something free. Keep your credits for the two or three people a quarter who are genuinely unreachable otherwise.
You are running volume. Connection requests as the default until you approach the ceiling, then InMail for the segment where the deal size justifies roughly $5 to $20 per conversation. Track the refund rate, because it is your real quality metric: a rising credit burn means your messages stopped working, and it will show up there before it shows up in your pipeline.
Frequently asked questions.
What is the difference between an InMail and a LinkedIn message?
InMail reaches people you are not connected to and costs a credit. A regular message is free but only works with existing connections.
Do I get InMail credits back if someone replies?
Yes. LinkedIn credits back any InMail that is accepted, declined, or replied to within 90 days of sending.
Can I buy more InMail credits?
No. LinkedIn states it is not possible to purchase credits outside the monthly allotment.
Can I send InMail on a free LinkedIn account?
No. You need Premium or Sales Navigator. You can, however, message anyone with Open Profile enabled for free.
Do unused InMail credits expire?
They accumulate up to a cap that depends on your plan, then stop accruing. They are wiped if you cancel.
What is the InMail character limit?
200 for the subject. For the body, LinkedIn's own help pages say 1,900 on one page and 2,000 on another. Write to 1,900.
Is InMail worth it?
It depends entirely on your reply rate, because replies refund the credit. Above roughly 30% it is inexpensive. Below 10% it is the most expensive channel you have.
Do InMails go to the recipient's email?
LinkedIn notifies recipients according to their own notification settings, which vary per user.
The short version.
Stop asking which is better and start asking what each one costs you. InMail bills you only when you fail, so it is priced by your message quality. Connection requests are free in cash and expensive in quota, and the quota cannot be bought at any price.
Default to connection requests until the ceiling. Spend credits past it. And go check who on your list has Open Profile before you spend anything at all.
Sources
LinkedIn Help: InMail character limits · InMail message credits and renewal process · Send an InMail Message · Manage your Open Profile settings · Sales Navigator plan comparison · Types of restrictions for sending invitations · LinkedIn Talent Blog on InMail response rates