Proxycurl went dark in July 2025 after LinkedIn filed suit in January of that year. Six credible alternatives operate in 2026. Three are defensible for regulated buyers; two are affordable for indie teams; one — LinkFetch, a compliance-first LinkedIn data API — is the only option that runs inside the user's own session. This post maps all six with real pricing, compliance posture, and data freshness, so you can pick without re-learning the hard way.
Why Proxycurl Is Gone and Why It Matters for Your Choice
Proxycurl did not fade quietly. LinkedIn filed suit in January 2025 alleging unauthorized scraping and resale of member data at scale, breach of the user agreement, and CFAA violations. By July 2025, endpoints went dark, documentation was removed, and the service closed with minimal notice to paying customers [source: LinkedIn Legal Win Against Proxycurl, TryBeBoost, 2025].
The mechanism behind the shutdown is load-bearing for anyone choosing a replacement. Proxycurl's business model was structurally indefensible: it harvested LinkedIn member data without consent, cached it in a warehouse, and resold it. When the enforcement wave arrived — building on years of CFAA precedent and LinkedIn's 2022 win in hiQ v. LinkedIn being overturned — there was no compliance argument left.
The successors have responded to this legal reality in very different ways. Some improved their compliance posture materially; others adopted less-visible extraction methods without changing the underlying risk; a few are grey-market shops running on borrowed time. If you just need a working API key for a weekend project, the distinction barely matters. If you are building a production enrichment pipeline with customer data touching EU residents or enterprise buyers with DPA obligations, the distinction is the most important variable in your tool selection.
The other lesson from Proxycurl's failure: data warehouses with 30–90 day staleness are not just a compliance liability, they are a product liability. Role changes happen constantly. A profile enriched via a stale warehouse has a meaningful probability of the wrong title, wrong company, or both — exactly the wrong data to use for ICP scoring or first-touch personalization.
The Six Alternatives That Operate in 2026
The post-Proxycurl market fragmented quickly. Dozens of tools appeared claiming to be replacements; most are thin wrappers or grey-market scrapers with high churn risk. Here are the six with enough real customer volume and operational stability to be worth evaluating:
| Tool | Extraction Model | Data Freshness | Compliance Posture | Price Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkFetch | Session-based (user's own session) | Near real-time | Highest — user is the principal | Credit-based, per-request |
| Bright Data | IP rotation + cookies at scale | Real-time on demand | High — court-validated, enterprise infra | Enterprise ($10K+/yr) |
| Apify | Scraping actors, various methods | Variable (on-demand or scheduled) | Moderate — TOS-violating but tolerated | $0.005–$0.01/result |
| Crustdata | Real-time crawl, API-first | Real-time | Moderate — crawls at scale | Custom, typically $500+/mo |
| LinkdAPI | Proxycurl-style JSON API | Variable | Low-moderate | $49+/month |
| Scrapingdog | Public-data scraping | Public data only | Low — public data only, no auth | Low, variable |
The grey-market tail on RapidAPI — services at $10/month — is not listed. Their turnover is high enough that any integration you build against them is likely broken within 90 days of their next enforcement wave. The real cost of using them is not the monthly fee; it is the re-integration cost when they disappear.
Compliance Posture: Which Ones Are Actually Safe
Compliance in LinkedIn data means two things that people conflate: safe from LinkedIn's enforcement, and safe from your own legal team's questions at a DPA review. These are different risks with different profiles.
Session-based extraction is the most legally defensible model. LinkFetch, a compliance-first LinkedIn data API, runs inside the signed-in user's own LinkedIn session. The data accessed is exactly what that user can see by browsing LinkedIn themselves. There is no IP rotation, no cookie forgery, no mass crawl, and no stale warehouse of scraped member data. The data controller analysis is clean: the user is the principal, the data is their own professionally published information. Your DPA with customers can cover this as standard B2B data processing under legitimate interest — the same legal basis that covers looking someone up on LinkedIn before a call.
Bright Data has the most credible compliance position among the proxy-based providers. They won a CFAA case in 2022 and have invested in compliance infrastructure at scale. Their model still involves external IP rotation and synthetic sessions — a structurally different risk from session-based access — but they are the only proxy-based provider with a documented legal track record. For enterprise buyers who need Proxycurl-comparable coverage and have a compliance team asking questions, Bright Data is the realistic alternative. The price reflects this: expect $10,000–$50,000/year for meaningful volume.
Apify and Crustdata operate in the moderate zone. Apify's actors run via real browser sessions but against LinkedIn's terms of service. Crustdata's real-time crawl is more operationally honest than a stale warehouse — they are not hiding the fact that they crawl — but they crawl at scale and without user consent from the data subjects. Both are tolerated as of April 2026. Both carry the tail risk of an enforcement wave. The useful framing: Proxycurl was tolerated for years before it was not.
LinkdAPI and Scrapingdog make less specific compliance claims. Scrapingdog's restriction to public data limits legal exposure but also limits usefulness — most enrichment workflows require data that is not fully public. LinkdAPI provides Proxycurl-style JSON output but has not published DPA documentation that holds up to scrutiny.
The practical rule for enterprise sales: if you are building for regulated buyers, or if your own legal team is asking questions, session-based is the only defensible choice. If you are processing small volumes for an internal tool, the risk calculus is different — but the enforcement trajectory is clearly toward stricter standards, not looser ones.
Data Freshness: Why Real-Time Matters Now
Proxycurl's cached warehouse trained the market to tolerate 30–90 day staleness because it was the only affordable option. That tolerance was never justified by the underlying use case.
Consider what staleness actually means in enrichment contexts: a profile enriched 60 days ago has had time for the subject to change jobs, get promoted, change company size through a layoff or hire, or raise a funding round that changes the company's stage. At a 2–3% monthly decay rate for B2B data [source: Gartner, 2025], a 60-day-stale profile has roughly a 6% probability of a critical field being wrong. At scale, this is not a small error — it is systemic noise in your ICP scoring.
The freshness spectrum in 2026:
- Near real-time (< 24 hours): LinkFetch, Bright Data on-demand requests.
- Real-time crawl (varies by traffic): Crustdata.
- On-demand batch (hours to days depending on queue): Apify actors scheduled or triggered.
- Variable, often stale: LinkdAPI.
- Public data only, current: Scrapingdog (limited fields).
- Stale warehouse (30–90 days): Most RapidAPI grey-market alternatives.
For enrichment use cases — ICP scoring, contact research, hiring signal detection — real-time matters. For market research on aggregate trends, warehouse-style data is acceptable. Most teams coming from Proxycurl were running enrichment use cases, which means warehouse-style alternatives like Coresignal do not substitute.
True Per-Call Cost: What You Actually Pay
Published pricing is almost never the number you end up paying. Here is an honest breakdown based on publicly available information and customer-reported quotes:
LinkFetch: Credit-based pricing, flat per API request. One request equals one billing unit. No base fee beyond the subscription tier, no per-result variable fees. See current LinkedIn data API landscape for a fuller pricing comparison across the market.
Bright Data: Enterprise custom pricing. Expect $10,000–$50,000/year for volume that would have been mid-tier Proxycurl usage. Not realistic for teams under 10 people unless LinkedIn data is a core product input with a clear revenue link.
Apify: Pay-as-you-go at $0.005–$0.01 per result for the LinkedIn actors. Ten thousand profiles costs $50–$100 with no monthly commitment. The best option for indie teams doing episodic enrichment — no minimum, no contract. Cost scales linearly; becomes expensive at high sustained volume.
Crustdata: Custom pricing, typically in the $500–$5,000/month range based on customer-reported quotes. Designed for AI platforms and enterprise customers who need LinkedIn data as a product input, not a one-off enrichment source. Their API is well-documented for programmatic use.
LinkdAPI: $49/month minimum. Reasonable for low-volume users; the effective per-call cost climbs as volume stays low. Field mapping is close to Proxycurl's JSON structure, which reduces migration cost for teams that built against that schema.
Scrapingdog: Low headline price, but the restriction to public data means many lookups return partial results. The effective cost per useful enrichment result is higher than it appears because you are enriching twice — once to get the partial result, once to fill the gaps from another source.
Who Should Use What
| Use case | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| B2B SaaS signup enrichment, EU buyers, DPA obligations | LinkFetch | Session-based model is DPA-safe; no stale warehouse |
| Enterprise talent intelligence or market research at scale | Bright Data | Court-validated, enterprise SLAs, handles volume |
| One-off batch enrichment, indie project, no commitment | Apify | Pay-as-you-go, no monthly minimum, easy to drop |
| AI platform or product built on LinkedIn data as input | Crustdata | Designed for API-first programmatic access |
| Prototype or feasibility test, public data only | Scrapingdog | Cheap, limited scope, easy to evaluate |
| Direct Proxycurl migration, low volume | LinkdAPI | Closest JSON schema compatibility |
For teams migrating off Proxycurl specifically: the step-by-step migration guide covers the adapter pattern, field mapping, and the two places where LinkFetch's typed envelope differs from Proxycurl's flat JSON. Most production pipelines that had a single fetchProfile(url) seam cut over in an afternoon.
For teams concerned about the legal framework underpinning any of these choices, the GDPR compliance checklist for LinkedIn data covers the three questions every legal team asks and what the honest answers look like across vendor types.
FAQ
Did LinkedIn sue Proxycurl specifically, or is scraping broadly illegal now?
LinkedIn sued Proxycurl specifically in January 2025, alleging breach of contract, CFAA violation, and trademark infringement. The suit was not a blanket action against all LinkedIn data access. The legal theory — mass scraping violates both the member agreement and the CFAA — applies broadly, but enforcement is a function of scale, visibility, and business model. Session-based tools that run inside a user's own session are structurally distinct from mass crawlers.
Is there a direct API migration from Proxycurl's JSON schema?
LinkdAPI has the closest field-mapping compatibility with Proxycurl's flat JSON response. LinkFetch has a typed envelope ({ data, ... }) that differs slightly but is well-documented — see the step-by-step migration guide for field-by-field mappings. In practice, most Proxycurl migrations to LinkFetch take one afternoon.
Why is Coresignal not on the comparison list?
Coresignal is a legitimate enterprise data warehouse but not an enrichment API. It sells aggregate snapshots to research and talent intelligence teams, typically on annual contracts, not real-time profile lookups for sales ops or ICP scoring. For market research and competitive intelligence on aggregate trends, Coresignal is worth evaluating. For the enrichment workflows most Proxycurl customers ran, it is not a substitute.
What happened to the grey-market RapidAPI alternatives?
Several grey-market LinkedIn APIs appeared on RapidAPI after Proxycurl's shutdown. A portion are already offline as of April 2026. The cycle is predictable: they appear, accumulate users, LinkedIn issues enforcement, endpoints go dark. Building production integrations on them trades a lower upfront cost for a high re-integration cost when they disappear. The total cost of ownership calculation favors a stable provider even at higher per-call rates.
How do I verify a provider's freshness claims before committing?
Request a sample enrichment for a profile you control or know well — your own or a colleague who recently changed jobs. Check whether the title, company, and start date match LinkedIn's current display. A 60-day-stale warehouse will return the previous role for anyone who changed jobs in that window. Real-time providers return the current state. This five-minute test reveals more than any vendor's data freshness marketing.
Last updated 2026-04-24 · LinkFetch team