Proxycurl vs ScrapIn

Why this comparison is really a migration question

Proxycurl was, for several years, the reference implementation of a developer-friendly LinkedIn data API. It had good documentation, a clean credit model and a following among engineers. LinkedIn brought legal action against its operator and in 2025 the service announced it was winding down.

So if you are reading a "vs" page in 2026, you are almost certainly a former Proxycurl customer working out where to go, not someone weighing two live options. ScrapIn is one of the closer replacements in shape — real-time lookups, developer-first, email capabilities included.

What actually transfers

Both are per-lookup APIs rather than dataset providers, so the mental model carries over: you hold an identifier, you call an endpoint, you get a record. Both are credit-priced, which means the same slightly awkward exercise of converting credits into a cost per record when you are budgeting.

Both also offer email capabilities, which matters because that is the single feature most likely to be load-bearing in an existing Proxycurl integration. If your pipeline depended on work-email lookup, that constraint narrows your options considerably — and rules us out, since we do not offer it at all.

The risk nobody in this category should downplay

The reason Proxycurl is on this page in the past tense is legal, not technical. That risk applies across the category, to ScrapIn, to us, and to everyone else. Any provider who tells you they are structurally immune is selling confidence they cannot back.

What you can reasonably evaluate is posture: does the provider use your credentials or cookies (which moves risk onto your own account), does it access anything behind a login, does it honour data removal requests, and does it write any of that down. Those are answerable questions, and they are worth asking of whoever you pick — including us.

Where we fit, stated plainly

We are a third option and we are not the cheapest one. We do not do email lookup, so if that was your Proxycurl use case we cannot replace it.

What we do offer is per-call pricing in dollars rather than credits, a cost figure on every response, a complete request log you can export, and a hard prepaid ceiling with no overdraft. If your frustration with the category has been not knowing what a pipeline actually cost until the invoice arrived, that is the problem we built around. If your constraint is cost per record, it is not.

Our Proxycurl migration notes map the endpoints across.

What to check before committing to either

Whatever you choose here, three questions are worth asking the provider directly and getting an answer to in writing.

Does using this put my own LinkedIn account at risk? Is a failed request charged? And what is the data removal process when somebody asks to be taken out?

A provider that answers all three plainly is telling you something about how they operate. One that is vague on any of them is telling you something too.

Keeping your integration portable

The clearest lesson from this comparison is that providers in this category can disappear at short notice. That is an argument for portability rather than for any particular vendor.

Put a thin translation layer between whichever API you pick and your own domain model, so the provider-specific field names live in exactly one file. Teams that parse provider JSON straight into business logic pay for that decision twice: once when the provider changes something, and once when they have to leave.

It is perhaps an hour of work up front, and it converts a migration from a project into an afternoon.