Is There a Free LinkedIn Plugin for AI Assistants?

“Free” is doing a lot of work in this corner of the market. Some tools are free because they are open source and you run them yourself. Some are free for fourteen days and then are not. And a few are genuinely free to use right now. Those three things look identical on a search results page and are completely different once you try to publish a post. This page separates them.

Is there actually a free LinkedIn plugin for AI assistants?

There is, but first a note on the word “plugin”. Most AI assistants stopped using that word. What they have now is a connector — a link between the assistant and an outside service — usually built on MCP (the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside tools). When people search for a LinkedIn plugin, an MCP connector is almost always the thing they end up installing.

Kalovio is one of those. You paste one address into Claude or ChatGPT, sign in with LinkedIn once, and then write posts by chatting. It costs nothing during the beta, and it does not ask for a card to start.

It is worth being precise about where it is confirmed to work, because a lot of pages are vague here:

So the fully free path, start to finish, is Claude’s free plan plus Kalovio. The ChatGPT path is free on Kalovio’s side, but you need a paid ChatGPT plan for Developer Mode.

What are the three kinds of “free” LinkedIn tool?

Sorting them out saves an evening of wasted setup.

1. Free and open source, but you host it yourself

These are code repositories you download and run on your own machine. There is no bill, but there is a cost: you install it, you keep it running, and you are the support team. The bigger issue is what most of them actually do.

The most popular one, stickerdaniel/linkedin-mcp-server, is the top Google result for “linkedin mcp”. Its own README states it “does not publish or create posts on your behalf”. It reads profiles and job listings by driving a browser with your logged-in session. The same README warns that accounts “can be restricted or banned”. So if your goal is posting, that free tool cannot do the job at all — and the free tools that scrape carry an account risk their own authors put in writing.

2. Free trials that end

Paid LinkedIn scheduling products often front a trial. That is a normal way to sell software and there is nothing wrong with it — just read the page for the end date and the price after it. A trial is a discount, not a free tool.

3. Genuinely free hosted tools

Someone else runs the server, you pay nothing, you install nothing. Kalovio sits here for now. The honest caveat is that “for now” is load-bearing, and there is a section on that below.

What do you get for free with Kalovio?

The whole tool. There is no locked feature list waiting behind an upgrade button during the beta. In plain terms, you can:

• Write and publish a post by chatting, with the exact text shown to you first.
• Schedule a post for later, up to a year ahead, and run a weekly posting queue.
• Keep drafts and come back to them.
• Post images — one image, or 2 to 9 as a swipeable set.
• Post a PDF or document carousel — the slide-style posts that do well on LinkedIn.
• Tag company pages and other Kalovio users as real clickable mentions.
• Save a voice profile so posts keep sounding like you.
• Track link clicks on links inside your posts.
• Delete a post that Kalovio published.
• Upload files through an in-chat panel or a browser upload page.

That is 26 tools in total. All of it runs through LinkedIn’s official interfaces — POST /v2/ugcPosts, and LinkedIn’s newer versioned /rest/posts for multi-image and document posts — using the free self-serve LinkedIn products “Sign In with LinkedIn” and “Share on LinkedIn” with the w_member_social permission. Nothing is scraped, and no cookie is ever pasted anywhere.

What are the actual limits on the free plan?

Real numbers, not marketing ones:

The 30-day file retention is the one that catches people out. The image library is a staging area for posting, not permanent storage — keep your originals somewhere else.

There are also honest product limits that have nothing to do with price:

• It cannot read posts it did not create. LinkedIn’s r_member_social permission is closed to self-serve apps, so your older posts are invisible to it.
• No engagement analytics. Likes, comments and impressions need LinkedIn’s partner-gated Community Management API. Kalovio has link-click tracking, which is a different and much smaller thing.
• You reconnect roughly every 60 days. LinkedIn member tokens expire and self-serve apps get no refresh token, so a reconnect prompt is normal rather than a fault.
• Document and PDF posts cannot be scheduled yet — immediate publish only.
• Multi-image and document posts use LinkedIn’s newer versioned interface, which may not be switched on for every self-serve app. If LinkedIn refuses, you get a clear message rather than a silent failure. Worth trying on your own account.
• No direct messages, no connection requests, no lead scraping. Not built, not planned.
• Chat image attachments do not reach it. Neither Claude nor ChatGPT can hand a file you dropped into the chat over to a connector, so images go through Kalovio’s upload panel or browser link instead.
• Kalovio is not open source and has no public code repository, so self-hosting it is not an option.

Will it stay free?

Nobody can promise that, and a page that did would be worth less than one that did not. Kalovio is in free public beta. There is no billing wired in and no card is collected. Pricing may change later. What you can rely on today is that using it now costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and that your LinkedIn access is revocable from your own LinkedIn settings at any moment, whatever happens to the product.

How do I check a free LinkedIn tool is safe before connecting it?

Free tools deserve more scrutiny, not less, because there is no invoice creating a relationship. Five checks, and the first one settles most cases:

• Does connecting send you to linkedin.com? A proper OAuth flow — the “Continue with LinkedIn” screen — means you type your password only into LinkedIn and the tool receives a limited key. If setup instead asks you to paste a session cookie (the string your browser uses to prove you are already logged in), stop. That string carries your whole account, not just posting.
• Can it name its permission? A real API tool says w_member_social without hedging.
• Can it name where it posts? /v2/ugcPosts or /rest/posts. A tool that cannot say where it posts is probably not posting through the API.
• Does the connection appear in your LinkedIn settings? An OAuth grant is listed under permitted services and can be removed in one click. A pasted cookie leaves no entry, so you cannot revoke that one tool without signing out everywhere.
• Does anything publish without your approval? Kalovio uses a two-step confirm gate: the first call returns a preview plus a signed token covering the exact content, and nothing publishes until a second call arrives confirming with a matching token. That is what stops hidden instructions inside a web page or a document from posting to your profile.

So which free option should you pick?

If you want to read LinkedIn data and you are comfortable running software yourself, the open-source scrapers exist — read their own warnings first. If you want to publish, they cannot help you, and Kalovio is free right now, needs no install, and is confirmed working in Claude and ChatGPT. Try it on your own account and see whether it fits how you actually write.