How we built it: pacing and daily limits for LinkedIn invites

Pacing in Sellinger is enforced in code, per LinkedIn account. The defaults are 20 invitations a day and 150 a week. Each morning the daily number is randomised by a few around the base (one for low limits, two for medium, three for high), never below 70% of the base. Sending stays outside a quiet window of 01:00 to 08:00 in account time, unless you set a schedule. The system also tracks pending invitations and warns at 400. None of this is a guarantee that LinkedIn will not restrict an account.

This is a look inside the part of the product that decides how much a LinkedIn account does each day. It is not a safety promise. It is the design, the reasons for it, and the parts we left out on purpose.

What problem does pacing solve?

An agent can send as fast as its settings allow. A person cannot. Left alone, an automated sender would behave like a machine: the same count at the same time every day, or a burst after a pause. LinkedIn's rules do not permit third party automation at all and it may restrict accounts it suspects of it, so pacing cannot make the activity allowed. What it can do is keep the activity modest, varied and easy to stop. Those are the design goals.

Where do the limits live?

On the account, not on the campaign. A LinkedIn account has a daily invitation limit (20 by default), a weekly cap (150) and counters for what it sent today. A campaign cannot override them. If two campaigns use the same account, they share one budget, which is the point: LinkedIn sees one person.

The setup screen shows recommended ranges so a new user does not guess. For LinkedIn the recommended total daily maximum across message types is 40 to 80, and the help text says a new account starts around 20 a day and climbs over a few weeks. These are guidance in the product, not LinkedIn figures. The help article on daily limits walks through the screen.

How is the daily number chosen?

At the start of each account day, the worker picks that day's limit. The rule is deliberately simple.

Two guards apply. The result is never below 70% of the base, so a bad draw cannot produce an unreasonably low day. And a base of 0 means invitations are off, with no randomisation.

Why randomise at all? A count that is identical every day is a pattern. A count that wobbles by a few looks like a person's week. We make no claim about what LinkedIn detects. The reasoning is plain design hygiene.

What happens when you change the setting?

Users change limits during the day, often after reading a warning. If the new base differs from today's limit by more than two, the new value is applied at once instead of waiting for tomorrow. The same check catches a limit that has fallen below the floor, and resets it to the base. This is the "fast reacting adjustment" in the code, and it exists because waiting until midnight to apply a lower limit would be the wrong behaviour.

How does the weekly cap work?

The weekly invitation limit of 150 is a separate counter, because LinkedIn applies limits to invitations over a week as well as over a day. The two together mean a high daily number cannot be sustained for a whole week by accident. Read what the LinkedIn invitation limits are for the platform side, and note that the weekly cap is a setting like the others.

What are quiet hours?

Sending follows a schedule you set, with days, hours and a time zone. When none is set, a quiet window of 01:00 to 08:00 local time applies, in the best known time zone for the account (the schedule's, then the owner's). All channel workers use the same check, so email and WhatsApp respect their own accounts' windows too. The point is not to hide anything. It is that a person does not usually send invitations at 3 a.m.

How do pending invitations fit in?

Invitations that nobody has answered pile up, and a large pile can itself cause problems. Once a day the worker counts the account's pending invitations. At 400 it sets a warning flag that the app shows on the account. At 450 a cleanup, if you have switched it on, withdraws stale invitations. We warn at 400 so there is time to enable cleanup before it would act.

A related check, added in October 2026, compares what LinkedIn shows with what Sellinger sent, to detect invitations sent by hand outside the tool. The warning appears on the card, the dashboard and the bell. See spotting invites sent outside your tool. Manual invites count against the same limits, so a team that sends by hand and by agent can exceed what it intended.

What happens when LinkedIn says no?

When LinkedIn returns a rate limit or refuses an action, the account gets a cooldown instead of a retry. For engagement actions, three refusals in a row pause that feature for 24 hours. Pushing through a refusal is the one behaviour we are sure is wrong.

What does email do?

Email has the same idea with different numbers. The default is 50 sends a day per mailbox. An optional warm up starts at 5 a day and doubles every 3 days up to the limit, which gives 5, 10, 20, 40 and then the limit. See email warmup is not enough for why that is only one part of reputation.

What did we leave out on purpose?

• A promise. No number here is a threshold from LinkedIn. We do not publish a restriction rate because we have not measured one we would stand behind.
• Account warm up. There is no logic that ramps up a new LinkedIn account automatically. The help text tells users to start low and raise gradually, and that is advice, not a feature.
• A claim about proxies. The connect flow accepts your own proxy configuration. We do not say it makes anything safer.
• One size for all. Defaults are defaults. An aged account with a clean history and a new one are different.

How should you use this?

1. Start at or below the defaults. Our own account sent 68,818 connection requests over a year and 41% were accepted, at modest daily volumes (case study).
2. Use the pacing planner to see what a daily number means per week.
3. Read the safety checklist before you raise anything: LinkedIn safety checklist.
4. Treat a rising pending count or a drop in acceptance as a reason to slow down, not to speed up.
5. Write down the date and the number whenever you raise a limit, so that if acceptance falls you know what changed.