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LinkedIn doesn't publish a price for LinkedIn Recruiter. Its Recruiter page says pricing "varies based on your organization's needs, such as company size, number of Recruiter seats" and sends you to a product consultant. The numbers below are what third parties report, as of October 2026, with where each one comes from.
The short answer
- Recruiter Lite: about $170 a month for one licence billed monthly (Dover, updated 5 August 2026), or about $1,680 a year billed yearly (Pin's blog, updated 7 April 2026, citing LinkedIn's comparison page). LinkedIn's own Recruiter Lite page offers "Try now for $0" but shows no monthly price.
- Recruiter (often called Recruiter Corporate): third-party estimates of $10,800 to $12,960 a seat a year (Dover). Pin's blog gives a wider range, $8,999 to $15,000, from buyer reports.
- Recruiter Professional Services, for staffing firms: $6,000 to $10,000 a seat a year, from buyer reports (Pin's blog).
None of these are LinkedIn list prices. Contracts are negotiated, so treat them as a range to plan with and get a quote.
What each plan includes
From LinkedIn's own pages, opened on 27 October 2026:
- Recruiter Lite: 30 InMails a month per licence, 20+ search filters, limited profile views, standard InMail and jobs reports. LinkedIn says it is "best for individuals hiring just a few people a year".
- Recruiter: up to 150 InMails a month per seat (its FAQ says 100 to 150), 40+ filters including Open to Work, unlimited profile views, custom reporting. LinkedIn says it is for talent and HR teams. Hiring Assistant is sold as an add-on.
- Recruiter Professional Services Plus: for staffing and recruiting firms, with "expanded InMail capacity". No figures are published.
What a seat costs per message
A Recruiter seat buys search across LinkedIn profiles and a fixed number of InMails. If you use every InMail, the arithmetic is simple:
- Recruiter Lite at $170 a month and 30 InMails: about $5.67 an InMail.
- Recruiter at $10,800 a year ($900 a month) and 150 InMails: about $6 an InMail.
That is the cost of reaching someone, not of knowing whether they can do the job. For an engineering role, a LinkedIn profile shows titles and employers. It doesn't show the code.
The cost per engineer, judged from GitHub
AyHire works from the other end. You describe the role, AyHire finds the people who wrote the public code that matches it, and it judges each person against your role's criteria from their commits, pull requests and READMEs, with a link behind every judgement. What you pay for is that judgement.
AyHire's price doesn't change with how many people you look at. It is $99 a month for one person, or $82.50 a month billed yearly, with a 14-day free trial and no card (pricing). The limits are hourly: 20 new analyses, 40 judgements against a role and 30 contact lookups an hour per account. So the cost per engineer judged depends only on how many you judge in a month:
- 25 engineers judged: $3.96 each ($3.30 billed yearly).
- 50 engineers judged: $1.98 each ($1.65).
- 100 engineers judged: $0.99 each ($0.83).
How many of those are qualified depends on your role and your criteria, so we won't quote a rate. What a judgement looks like is in how AyHire decides: AyHire only says "talk to them first" when every must-have is clearly shown in someone's public work.
What one search returns
On 27 October 2026 we asked AyHire, through its MCP server, for the people behind LLM inference engines: repos matching "llm inference" with 1,000 stars or more, pushed since 1 September 2026. 84 repos matched. AyHire read the 8 most-starred, including vllm-project/vllm, ggml-org/llama.cpp, sgl-project/sglang and huggingface/transformers, and returned the 40 people who wrote the most of them, each with their profile, the repo and their rank in it. That search is free: it reads GitHub only. Judging people against a role is what uses the plan.
What AyHire doesn't replace
Be clear about the trade before you cancel a seat:
- No InMail and no outreach. AyHire finds a LinkedIn profile and an email with their source and how sure it is, but it never contacts anyone. You write from your own inbox.
- Public work only. Many good engineers keep their work in private company repos. AyHire marks that as unknown, never as a weakness, but it can't judge what it can't see.
- Engineering roles. For roles without public work, LinkedIn's reach is hard to beat.
Many teams use both: AyHire to decide which engineers are worth a message, and LinkedIn or email to send it.
Questions people ask
Is there a free trial of LinkedIn Recruiter?
LinkedIn's Recruiter Lite page offers "Try now for $0". For Recruiter, it asks you to talk to a product consultant.
How many InMails do you get with LinkedIn Recruiter?
Recruiter Lite gives 30 InMails a month per licence. Recruiter gives up to 150 a month per seat, according to LinkedIn's Recruiter page (its FAQ says 100 to 150).
Is LinkedIn Recruiter Lite worth it for hiring engineers?
For reach, yes: it is the cheapest way into LinkedIn's search and InMail. For judging engineers, it shows the same profile anyone can see. Pair it with a way to read the code, by hand (finding engineers on GitHub) or with AyHire.
What are the alternatives to LinkedIn Recruiter for technical hiring?
Sourcing tools such as SeekOut and Juicebox search many sources and send outreach; AyHire judges engineers from their GitHub work. Our pages on SeekOut alternatives, Juicebox alternatives and GitHub recruiting tools compare them, with prices.
Sources, opened on 27 October 2026: LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, Dover, Recruiter Lite vs Professional (updated 5 August 2026), Pin, LinkedIn Recruiter pricing (updated 7 April 2026). LinkedIn's Premium pages, which may list Recruiter Lite's price, didn't load for us, so that figure is from Dover and Pin. AyHire's prices and limits are from its own pricing page.