As of October 2025, LinkedIn will increase the price per InMail from $3 to $21. That’s a 600% price hike without offering users anything new in return.
At first glance, this can only be perceived as yet another software company price gouging and abusing its monopoly position.
Yet behind the terrible communication might be a genius strategic course correction by LinkedIn.
Let’s steelman each side.
Why It Might Be Stupid
Let me start by stating the obvious.
Having your sales reps tell clients: “You’ll be paying €14,000 instead of €2,000 next month for the exact same solution” is a horrible strategy.
Unless you’re in the early days of your company, a 6x price increase is generally ill-advised. And when you do: you better expect outrage and churn.
On top of that, telling your customers 30 days in advance is absolutely bonkers. Any price increase in the double digits deserves to be communicated months in advance and a triple-digit increase probably deserves two whole quarters.
Finally, you better prepare a message that highlights why this is in your client’s benefit. Because paying 7x for the exact same thing sure feels like daylight robbery.
When increasing your price, storytelling is essential. A good story might justify a 300% increase, whereas a bad one might cause outrage over 10%.
Why It Might Be Genius
While pure speculation, we can make a case why this might turn out to be a brilliant move.
There are two possible outcomes with the new price:
Nothing changes. Users still buy the same number of InMail and LinkedIn now earns 600% more from InMail.
Massive churn. A giant chunk of users churn away from the platform, most will buy fewer InMail, and for a small group nothing changes.
The first one is an obvious win for LinkedIn. But the second might also be a win for everyone involved as long as it stays within bounds.
Let’s take an extreme situation: the customer response leads to 80% fewer purchases of InMail. With a 600% price increase that would still result in 40% more revenue from InMail. Such a response would be unprecedented (but then again, so is a 6x price increase).
But what are the second-order consequences?
The people on LinkedIn would receive 80% fewer InMail messages. Instead of being flooded with 10 messages every week, people would now just receive 2.
And as each InMail has just become 6x more expensive, sending generic messages is basically corporate waste. So, recipients will see fewer–but more personalised–messages.
The third-order consequence: much higher conversion per InMail.
Don’t believe me? Compare the cold calls you receive today versus 5 years ago. I used to get multiple calls a day with the same generic pitch and I’d hang up on all of them. Now, I receive one call per week and I actually have a conversation with half of them.
Exact same story with cold emails. The more I get, the fewer I respond to and vice versa.
If this turns out to be the case:
Users of LinkedIn will receive fewer messages;
InMail will become more personalised;
Conversion rates will dramatically improve;
Overall user retention will probably improve as well;
InMail revenue will likely increase between 100% and 400%.
Whether price gouging or genius, LinkedIn just turned InMail into one of the most outrageous pricing experiments in tech.
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Tjitte Joosten is the Founder of RevFixr, the one-stop shop for better monetisation of your customer base. RevFixr turns pricing into your biggest growth lever. Prior to founding RevFixr, Tjitte was responsible for the commercial strategy and operations at tech companies like Docfield and Experfy.
