Daily limits that keep your LinkedIn safe

Your LinkedIn account is the most important asset in your outbound. Push too many invites through it and LinkedIn restricts it, and every warm path you had goes dark with it. Send a note to a CFO at 11 at night on a Saturday and you look like a bot before they read a word.

Stage 1 sends from your own accounts. So it sends the way a careful person would, a few at a time, inside working hours.

Three caps and a window

There are three daily caps. Invites, LinkedIn messages and emails. Out of the box they're set at 20 invites, 40 messages and 40 emails a day.

Then there's the window. By default Stage 1 sends between 8 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon, Monday to Friday, in your workspace's time zone. Weekends are off. Tick the box if you want to send on them.

Outside the window, nothing goes. Not an invite, not a message, not an email.

What happens at the cap

Before every send, Stage 1 checks the clock and today's count. When a cap is hit, the rest of that day's touches stay scheduled and go out on the next sending day. Nothing is dropped and nothing is rushed out late to catch up.

A few details matter here. The ask Stage 1 sends a mutual connection for an introduction counts as a LinkedIn message, so it sits inside the same cap. Profile visits aren't capped. And the people at one account are spaced at least a day apart, so a company never gets hit all at once.

If you run with review on, approving a message doesn't send it on the spot. It goes out inside your sending hours like everything else. More on that in owning every send.

Where you set them

Open Settings, then Sending. You'll see the three caps, how many of each are left today, the start and end hour, and the weekend box. The time zone lives under Settings, Workspace, and both research runs and sending hours follow it.

Only the workspace owner can change these. The app won't take an end hour that comes before the start hour, and it won't take a daily cap above 200.

Keep daily limits at 200 or below. LinkedIn restricts accounts long before that.

The same screen warns that LinkedIn restricts accounts that push past roughly 100 invites a week. Start low and raise slowly.

Before any prospect gets a message, run a test send from Settings, Connections. It sends a real email to you, or a real LinkedIn message to someone you're connected to, so you know the plumbing works before it matters.

Why this matters for services

You're not selling a $40 tool to ten thousand people. You're selling a $250K engagement to a handful of senior buyers at a few dozen accounts. You don't need volume. You need every message to land on a good day, from an account that's still in good standing next quarter. That's the case in why volume outbound breaks for big deals.

Sending in business hours matters for the reply too. A note that lands at 9 on a Tuesday gets read like a note from a peer. And the best warm paths in Stage 1 run through LinkedIn search, which needs an account in good standing. See LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator for warm paths.

The defaults are set to keep your account safe. If you change them, raise them slowly and watch the invite accept rate in Insights.