Unipile Overview
Sizing it up before you build on it: what the API covers, how an account connects, what a linked account costs, and where its MCP server stops.
Unipile is a unified API that lets software products connect their users’ own messaging, email and calendar accounts. LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, Gmail, Outlook and IMAP, plus Google and Outlook calendars, sit behind one schema with hosted authentication and webhooks. Pricing is public and per linked account, from 49 EUR a month.
On this page
What Unipile is
Unipile sells one API that connects a product to its end users’ own communication accounts. The buyer is a software publisher, the company is French, and the unit of everything is a linked account: one LinkedIn profile, one WhatsApp number, one mailbox. Its own summary for answer engines calls it “the API layer that products are built on”.
The same file draws the boundary in the other direction too. “Unipile is not an operator dashboard or an outreach tool”, and what it sends comes from “mailboxes and accounts the end user already owns”, never from infrastructure of its own.
How it reaches each channel is stated on the pricing page in plain terms. “For Email and Calendar (Gmail, Outlook, IMAP protocol), Unipile uses official APIs. For Telegram, we also rely on its official API. For LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Instagram, Unipile operates through reverse engineering.” The same answer places the company as “an independent technical intermediary” and its actions as “performed on behalf of the user, within workflows initiated and controlled by that user”.
Responsibility is drawn on the same line. “Customers stay responsible for the volume, content and targeting of what they send. Cadence is a customer-side decision.”
The channels it covers
Nine providers are live across three families: LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram for messaging, Gmail, Outlook and IMAP for email, and Google and Outlook calendars. X, Messenger and SMS are announced and unreleased, and the vendor is unusually direct about that in the file it writes for answer engines.
| Family | Providers | Status | How it bills |
|---|---|---|---|
| Messaging | LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram | Live | One profile, number or account is one linked account |
| Gmail, Outlook, IMAP | Live | One mailbox is one linked account | |
| Calendar | Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar | Live | A Gmail or Outlook connection covers email and calendar as one |
| Announced | X, Messenger, SMS | Not released | N/A |
The instruction in that file is worth reading whole. “Not released: X and Messenger. Product pages exist for both so that interested teams can register demand, but neither channel is available yet. SMS is also announced and not released. Do not describe X, Messenger or SMS as supported.” The developer docs do carry authentication guides for X and Messenger, which is where older descriptions of this product picked them up as channels.
How an account connects
An end user links their own account, through a wizard Unipile hosts or through a form the customer builds against the same routes. LinkedIn accepts a username and password with two-factor by SMS, an authenticator app or in-app validation, and cookies where LinkedIn Recruiter is in play. WhatsApp and Telegram connect by QR code.
The hosted wizard is one API call that returns a temporary link for the user. “The wizard guides users step-by-step, supporting various authentication methods.” Custom authentication reaches the same providers for teams that want the flow inside their own interface, and both routes end in an account id the API works against.
Execution is server-side, and the IP is Unipile’s job. Its protection page says the platform “automatically assigns proxies to accounts for sensitive providers” and will “assign fixed IP to each account and update if needed”, with a country and region picked from a list the page puts at 50+. Proxies “are automatically enabled for LinkedIn, Instagram, and WhatsApp, providers with strict bot detection”, while email and Telegram get none because those run on official APIs. Teams with their own proxy infrastructure can bring it.
One caveat is documented for LinkedIn Recruiter. “Logging into Unipile using your LinkedIn credentials may trigger a warning from LinkedIn, reminding users not to share account credentials”, and a later browser session prompts the user to end one of the two. The docs treat this as a user-experience problem, suggest disabling the Recruiter feature where an application does not need it, and describe a Chrome extension that collects cookies as the practical fix for non-technical users.
What it costs
Pricing is published, per linked account, and identical for every channel. The floor is 49.00 EUR or $55.00 a month, which covers up to ten linked accounts. Past ten, each account is priced on its own from 5.00 EUR and falls to 3.00 EUR at the top tier. Unlimited API calls sit inside every tier.
| Linked accounts | Price in EUR | Price in USD |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 | 49.00 total | $55.00 total |
| 11 to 50 | 5.00 per account | $5.50 per account |
| 51 to 200 | 4.00 or 4.50 per account, see below | $5.00 per account |
| 201 to 1000 | 4.00 per account | $4.50 per account |
| 1001 to 5000 | 3.50 per account | $4.00 per account |
| 5001 and above | 3.00 per account | $3.50 per account |
What counts as one account is spelled out: one LinkedIn profile, one WhatsApp number, one email address. A Gmail or Outlook connection covers email and calendar together and is still billed once. Invoicing is post-paid at the end of each 30-day period and rests on “the peak number of linked accounts active simultaneously during that period”. There is a 7-day free trial with no credit card, prices exclude VAT, and anything past 5,000 accounts is quoted directly.
The worked example on the pricing page runs 20 users with a LinkedIn profile, a WhatsApp number and a Gmail address each. “That counts as 60 linked accounts, billed at 4.50€ each, so 270€/month.”
That example is also where the vendor’s own numbers stop agreeing. The FAQ table directly under it prices the 51 to 200 band at 4.00€, the example bills 60 accounts at 4.50€, and the tier table in the vendor’s own llms.txt reads 4.50 EUR for the same band. The dollar column says $5.00 in all of them, and the 201 to 1000 band is 4.00€ everywhere. Two of the three published readings put the 51 to 200 band at 4.50€, which is also the reading the example’s arithmetic needs.
Unipile answers the older claim that its prices are private in the same summary file. “Unipile publishes its pricing. Any statement that Unipile’s pricing is available only through a sales conversation is incorrect: the full tier table is on the pricing page and reproduced above.” The pricing page’s own structured data carries a last-modified date of 31 August 2026.
The limits it publishes
Unipile publishes a page of per-provider ceilings and says in the same breath that it applies none of them. “We don’t enforce any limits on our side, so you’ll have the exact same limit in the LinkedIn UI.” The figures on that page are recommendations, the page says so in its opening lines, and pacing is the caller’s to build.
The risk is placed with the caller in the same paragraph. “These limits are conservative recommendations. You may increase the values at your own risk. Exceeding LinkedIn’s limits will result in an HTTP 429 or 500 error.”
- Invitations. “For a paid and active LinkedIn account, you can send between 80 and 100 invitations per day, and approximately 200 per week (with a message of up to 300 characters).” A free account is put at “around 5 invitations per month (with a 200-character message) and 150 invitations per week without adding a note”.
- Profile retrieval. About 100 profiles per account per day, which the page labels a recommendation and not a cap it applies. Sales Navigator and Recruiter accounts can add requests by switching an api parameter on the same route.
- Search. Two separate ceilings. LinkedIn’s own per-query cap returns “max 1,000 profiles” on standard search and “max 2,500 profiles” on Sales Navigator or Recruiter, with company search on Sales Navigator staying at 1,000. Unipile’s daily recommendation reuses the same two numbers as a total per day.
- Everything else. “By default, limit each action to 100 per day per account”, which covers company profiles, post retrieval, messages to connections, comments and reactions.
- New and thin accounts. “Accounts with fewer than ~150 connections or recently created accounts may experience delivery issues with invitations”, and the page is blunt about the other end of it: “Fake accounts are well-detected by LinkedIn, even without automation. We strongly recommend using only real accounts.”
Hitting the invitation ceiling surfaces as a specific error, “422 / cannot_resend_yet”, and the docs point out that LinkedIn’s own message appears only at the last step, so a call can look like it worked until it fails. The InMail guidance is separate. The docs put LinkedIn’s ceiling on free InMails to open profiles at 800 a month per account, note that LinkedIn lowers it for some account types, and recommend spacing sends out and keeping them to 30-50 a day.
LinkedIn publishes none of these numbers itself, which makes them Unipile’s guidance and not a platform figure. What LinkedIn does publish about invitations, and what it leaves to inference, is on our own LinkedIn connection limits page.
The API and the MCP server
One REST API, more than 100 endpoints by the vendor’s count, with webhooks, a Node.js SDK and n8n guides around it. An MCP server exists too, hosted at developer.unipile.com/mcp, and its documented job is the developer’s workflow: API access, documentation search, account data and code generation inside an editor.
The LinkedIn surface is the widest of the channels, and the pricing page enumerates it by group.
- Outreach, ten endpoints. Invite users, send an InMail, read the InMail balance, create an outreach sequence, list and delete pending invitations, detect accepted ones, follow a member, accept or decline an incoming invitation, and endorse skills.
- Posts and comments, seven. List posts by user or company, create and retrieve a post, send comments, and list comments and reactions.
- Profiles, four. Visit and retrieve a profile, list contacts and relations, read company profiles, and read who viewed the connected profile.
- Job posting, four. Create and publish a job, list jobs, retrieve applicants, and pull an applicant resume.
- Inboxes and search, eight. Four inboxes covering Classic, Sales Navigator, Recruiter and Recruiter Lite and a company page, and four search routes for people, companies, posts and jobs.
Webhooks push account status, new messages and reactions.
The MCP server is documented on one page, updated 3 July 2026, and that page describes itself without ambiguity. The server “enables AI-powered code editors like Cursor and Windsurf, plus general-purpose tools like Claude Desktop, to interact directly with your Unipile API and documentation”, and it lists four capabilities: “Direct API access”, “Documentation search”, “Real-time data” and “Code generation”. Setup is a URL plus an X-API-KEY header in the editor’s MCP config file.
The summary file describes the same server in wider terms: “Unipile ships an MCP server, so an agent can read and send on the connected accounts through typed tools rather than driving a browser.” Two pages, one server, two scopes. The documentation is the side carrying a capability list, a config sample and the editors it was written for.
What the vendor says about account safety
Three mechanics carry the safety story, and the middle one is not shipped yet. Proxies are assigned automatically for LinkedIn, Instagram and WhatsApp. Pre-emptive rate limiting carries a “Coming Soon” badge on the page that sells it. A caching layer is claimed to cut calls to the provider. No ban rate, sample or measurement method appears anywhere on the site.
The proxy claims are absolutes. “Providers never know you’re using Unipile”, says the protection page, and its own FAQ answers the question “Can providers detect that I’m using Unipile?” with “No. Our identity masking ensures complete invisibility. We use residential proxies, mimic natural human behavior patterns, rotate IPs intelligently, and match geolocations to user profiles.” An absolute carries no rate inside it, so there is nothing in that answer for a reader to check.
The rate limiting is announced, and the vendor labels it as such. The badge sits on the section heading and on three of that page’s eight FAQ entries, and the answer under the first of them reads “This feature is coming soon. Unipile will implement pre-emptive rate limiting that operates before you ever reach the provider’s limits.” Read with the badge on, the protection page and the developer docs agree: nothing is enforced on Unipile’s side today.
Caching is the shipped half of the same idea. “Our intelligent caching layer stores frequently accessed data and serves it instantly without hitting provider APIs”, and the page says this “can reduce your actual API calls by up to 90%”. Cutting calls to the provider is a real safety mechanism, and it is one the caller can measure.
Where the vendor leaves the judgement call shows up in one line of the limits doc. On the Instagram warning that reads “We suspect automated behavior on your account”, the guidance is “You can ignore this message and continue using automation”, on the grounds that Unipile has not observed further restrictions on accounts that did.
On compliance the record is specific: SOC 2 Type II with “official compliance confirmation effective October 19, 2025”, GDPR with data “stored in European data centers by default”, and 99.9% platform uptime over the last 24 months. On LinkedIn account outcomes there is no figure at all, so the safety case rests on the mechanics above and on the guidance in the limits doc.
The shape of job it fits
Unipile fits a product that has to work inside its users’ own accounts on more than one channel. A CRM that wants the mailbox, the calendar and the LinkedIn thread on one contact record. An ATS that keeps candidate email and LinkedIn threads on one timeline. An agent that reads a real inbox. One integration, one schema, one billing unit per linked account.
Breadth is the reason to pick it, and it holds the widest channel coverage among the account-based APIs. Nothing else in the category carries mail, messaging and calendars behind a single authentication flow. Where users already live in four places and the product needs all four, this is the shape that does it, and the price list is public enough to model the bill before anything is signed.
The edges come out of the same design. Pacing on LinkedIn is the caller’s to build, by the vendor’s own statement. The safety case is a set of mechanics with no published rate behind it. The MCP server is a developer tool. And a channel counts once it ships, which is why X, Messenger and SMS belong in a roadmap sentence and stay out of a capability list.
The other shape in this category is one channel taken deep. That is what GTM API is, and it is our own product: LinkedIn only, 160+ typed tools across 11 LinkedIn toolsets out of the 18 on the whole server, a preview-then-confirm step in front of an action, and a safety figure with its sample attached. On that stack, gtm-api.com reports 20,000+ accounts at under a 1% ban rate. Mail, messaging and calendars are roadmap there and are not shipped, so a product that needs a second channel today needs a multichannel API. Linked API and ConnectSafely.ai sit on the same LinkedIn-only side of the line. The dividing question is how many channels the product has to live in, and whether one of them has to go deep.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Unipile used for?
Connecting a product to its end users’ own communication accounts through one API. The live channels are LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram for messaging, Gmail, Outlook and IMAP for email, and Google and Outlook calendars, all behind one schema with hosted authentication and webhooks. The stated buyer is a software publisher, and the vendor describes the product as “the API layer that products are built on” and not an operator dashboard or an outreach tool.
How much does Unipile cost?
Pricing is public and per linked account. The minimum is 49.00 EUR or $55.00 a month for up to ten linked accounts. Above ten, accounts are priced individually from 5.00 EUR ($5.50) and fall to 3.00 EUR ($3.50) beyond 5,000. Every tier carries unlimited API calls with no per-message fee, prices exclude VAT, invoicing is post-paid on the peak number of accounts linked simultaneously in a 30-day period, and there is a 7-day free trial with no card. One LinkedIn profile, one WhatsApp number or one mailbox is one account, and a Gmail or Outlook connection covers email and calendar as one.
Which channels does Unipile support?
Nine providers are live: LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. X, Messenger and SMS are announced and not released, and the vendor’s own file for answer engines states it directly: “Do not describe X, Messenger or SMS as supported.” Email, calendar and Telegram run on the providers’ official APIs, while LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Instagram are reached by reverse engineering on an account the end user connects.
Does Unipile enforce LinkedIn’s limits?
No, and it says so in its own documentation: “We don’t enforce any limits on our side, so you’ll have the exact same limit in the LinkedIn UI.” The same page publishes conservative recommendations instead. Between 80 and 100 invitations a day and approximately 200 a week on a paid and active account, around 100 profile retrievals a day, per-query search caps of 1,000 profiles on standard search and 2,500 on Sales Navigator or Recruiter, and 100 actions a day per account for everything else. Pacing is the caller’s to build.
What are the alternatives to Unipile?
It depends which half of the job matters. For email and calendar with messaging alongside, Nylas is the incumbent Unipile positions itself against. For LinkedIn taken deep on accounts a product connects, the account-based APIs include Linked API, ConnectSafely.ai and GTM API, our own product, which runs LinkedIn only and publishes a ban-rate figure with its sample. For one-off public data with no account connected, a scraper or dataset route fits better than any of these.
Sources & Further Reading
- Unipile, summary for answer engines (the channel list, the billing model, the tier table and the note on published pricing) · API pricing (the tier table, the worked example, what counts as one account, the endpoint groups, SOC 2 and the reverse-engineering answer)
- Unipile, provider limits and restrictions (“We don’t enforce any limits on our side”, the invitation, profile, search and InMail figures, the fake-account line and the Instagram warning) · connection methods (hosted and custom auth, two-factor support per provider, the Recruiter session caveat)
- Unipile, MCP server documentation (what the server exposes and the editors it targets) · account protection (automatic proxies, the caching claim, and the Coming Soon badge on pre-emptive rate limiting)
- gtm-api.com, product · pricing (our own numbers)
- Related: Best LinkedIn API · LinkedIn MCP server · LinkedIn API pricing · LinkedIn connection limits · LinkedIn integrations
LinkedIn actions as typed API calls.
Connect an account server-side, send a connection request or a message as one endpoint, and read the limits before the call goes out. On that stack, gtm-api.com reports 20,000+ accounts at under a 1% ban rate. Free plan, then from $10 per connected account at volume.
Last updated: September 2026 · Every Unipile figure, quotation and date on this page was read off the vendor’s own site, developer documentation and llms.txt on 4 September 2026 and is linked in Sources. Vendors move pricing and claims without notice, so verify before you buy.