PhantomBuster runs cloud automations — they call them Phantoms — against LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and others: extract a list, send connection requests, scrape followers. It is the most established tool in the browser-automation corner of this market.
And it prices in the single hardest unit to forecast on this page.
What it costs
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Execution time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | 30 min/month, 1 slot, 50 MB |
| Start | $69 | $56 | 20 hours/month |
| Grow | $159 | $128 | 80 hours/month |
| Scale | $439 | $352 | 300 hours/month |
The free tier has been 30 minutes a month since July 2026 and is separate from the 14-day trial.
⚠️ Hours are the unit nobody can price in advance
Every other competitor here meters something countable before you run it: a call, a credit, a result, a post, a profile. PhantomBuster meters wall-clock time your automation spends running.
Their own documentation puts a single profile extraction or LinkedIn message at roughly 30 seconds. Take that at face value and the Start tier's 20 hours is about 2,400 extractions a month — call it $0.029 each, which is competitive.
But that arithmetic is ours, built on their example, and the real number moves with things you do not control: how slow the target site is today, whether a retry fires, whether a rate limit makes the Phantom wait. A 30-second job that waits 90 seconds costs three times as much, and nothing on the invoice explains why.
We publish the division because it is the only way to compare at all. We are flagging that it is the least reliable number in this family, and that is a property of the pricing model rather than a criticism of the product.
Who it's for
PhantomBuster fits lead generation and outbound — the job is "work through this list of profiles and act on each one", and browser automation is genuinely the right tool for that, especially on LinkedIn, where no public API exists worth the name.
It fits badly as a data backend. If your product calls an API on a user's request, you cannot have the cost of that request depend on how slow a third party was that minute.
Where it is better than us
LinkedIn. We do not serve it at all; they do, and the only competitor here who did is gone.
Actions, not just reads. Sending messages and connection requests is outside anything we do.
Browser-level access. A headless session logged in as a user reaches pages no public-page reader can. That is also the part that carries the most risk — see below.
The legal part
This is the sharpest difference, and it is not about price.
PhantomBuster's model typically runs as the user, with the user's session
cookie, against platforms whose terms prohibit exactly that. The enforcement
history in this category is real: hiQ v. LinkedIn and
Meta v. Bright Data are the backdrop, and
one social API in this comparison shut down over it.
We read public pages with no login and hold no customer credentials — a narrower product with a narrower exposure. We publish where we think the line is and a removal route, and we are not going to characterise their legal position for them.
Who measured this
We did, and we compete only at the edges — for LinkedIn outreach we are not an option.
⚠️ This reading is weaker than most on this site. Their pricing page returned
no readable content, so the plan prices and execution hours come from search
restricted to phantombuster.com, including their own blog and support
centre. That is a primary source, and it is one grade below reading the table
on the page.
The per-extraction figure is our arithmetic on their ~30-second example, and it is the number we would least trust in production.
What we run is an hourly archive of what's rising. What we sell is one response shape across eleven platforms, billed per call so the price does not move with someone else's latency.
Plan prices, execution hours and the free-tier allowance read from
phantombuster.com on 2 October 2026 via search restricted to that domain
(/blog and support.phantombuster.com), because the pricing page returned no
readable content. Primary source, one grade below a direct page read, and
flagged as such. The ~30-second-per-extraction example is theirs; the 2,400-run
and $0.029 figures are our arithmetic on it. Verify before deciding.