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George Kioko
George Kioko

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4 days to lock in current LinkedIn scraper pricing

Short post. The LinkedIn Company Employees Scraper on my Apify portfolio is raising PPE pricing on May 5. If you have a planned batch coming up, run it before then.

This is not a marketing nudge. This is an "I auto-disabled half the actor's value because I was losing money on residential proxy and the May 5 fix re-enables it" situation.

What changes May 5

Event Old New Multiplier
short-profile $0.003 $0.009 3x
full-profile $0.006 $0.015 2.5x
full-profile-with-email $0.01 $0.025 2.5x
actor-start $0.005 $0.005 unchanged

A run that costs $0.10 today would cost about $0.30 after May 5. Same data, same accuracy, same actor.

Why now

Verification was auto-disabled on April 24 because residential proxy cost was running below the short-profile price. The actor falls back to confidence=low SERP-only output until the May 5 increase reactivates verified mode.

If you absolutely cannot wait until May 5 for verified data, pass acceptDiscoveryFallback: true on input. Build 2.2.21+ runs SERP-only at the current $0.003 rate.

Full breakdown of how the pricing got into this state in the first place:

theaientrepreneur.hashnode.dev/two-agency-users-were-83-of-my-revenue-they-left-and-i-noticed-29-days-later

Three actions if you use this actor

  1. Run any planned bulk batches before May 5 to lock in current pricing on the events you need.
  2. Update your maxTotalChargeUsd cap if you have one. The same volume after May 5 needs roughly 3x the cap on short-profile-heavy runs.
  3. If your pipeline expects verified output and you cannot wait, switch to acceptDiscoveryFallback now to keep getting results at current pricing, with the confidence=low caveat.

What does not change

The actor itself. Same code, same maintenance, same response time. Same author who reads every Discussion thread.

The May 5 change brings pricing in line with what residential verification costs. After it lands, verification turns back on automatically and your runs return verified worksFor data again at the new rate.

When this is the wrong actor for you

If you only need the candidate set and not LinkedIn-verified worksFor data, the SERP-only path at $0.003 stays cheaper than competitors that bundle verification. If you need fully-verified output and your spreadsheet math says $0.009 per profile is too much, my actor is not the right tool. Phantombuster bundles verification at $69/mo for low volume. Bright Data is more expensive but enterprise-grade. Apify itself has 50+ LinkedIn actors, some priced lower for lower-quality verification.

I run mine at $0.009 because the residential proxy cost behind verification is real. Lower-priced competitors either skip verification, scrape with logged-in cookies (ToS risk), or run at a loss until they shut down (Proxycurl pattern).

Bottom line

Run your batches before May 5 if you can. Drop questions on the Apify Discussion thread for the actor if anything is unclear about the change.

apify.com/george.the.developer/linkedin-company-employees-scraper

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