LinkedIn now wants to be the place where your consulting calls get booked, paid for and held, and the October 15 update makes that ambition hard to miss. The company announced a new creator dashboard, an In-Stream Ads test for video creators and a wider push behind Advice Sessions, the feature that lets you sell 1:1 consultations straight from your profile. Social Media Today reports that an “experts” showcase page for finding advisors by category is also on the way.
Advice Sessions first appeared in May, but it ran as a quiet, invite-only beta. The October push is the signal that LinkedIn intends to scale it. If you sell expertise for a living (coaching, consulting, fractional work, career advice), the questions below are the ones worth answering before you pay for the tier that unlocks it.
What exactly do LinkedIn Advice Sessions let you sell?
A paid, one-on-one video consultation. A “Get advice from me” button sits on your profile; a visitor picks a time, pays, and gets a calendar invite. According to Advisor.ca’s reporting, payments run through Stripe and calls happen on Google Meet. If you want to offer free intro calls instead, a separate “Book an appointment” button links out to Calendly.
LinkedIn’s own help page says hosts set their own rate and their own availability, and bookers can choose a slot within a 30-day window. The people booking you do not need Premium, but they do need a verified profile and must be in the United States.
Who can host right now, and what does it cost?
Hosting is still “limited to invited LinkedIn Premium Business subscribers in the United States,” per the same help page. Tubefilter puts the Business Premium price at $59.99 a month, which is about $720 a year before you have sold a single session.
A LinkedIn spokesperson told Advisor.ca that the plan is to open the feature to all Premium Business and higher tiers globally “in the coming months,” rolling out gradually “to account for learnings as we ramp.” So if you are outside the U.S., or inside it but not invited, the honest answer is: not yet.
Before you can take a booking you also have to finish Stripe identity verification, connect a bank account and link a Google Calendar. The booking button does not appear on your profile until that setup is done.
Does LinkedIn take a cut?
Not at the moment, and that phrasing matters. Advisor.ca reports that LinkedIn takes no revenue share “at this time.” What you do pay is Stripe’s processing fee, which the help page says is deducted from your payout.
For context, dedicated expert-call marketplaces are far more expensive. A comparison published by Talkspresso (a competitor, so read it with that in mind) puts Intro’s cut at 25% to 30% of each session and Clarity’s historically at 15% to 20% or more. Against that, a flat subscription plus card processing looks cheap once you sell more than a session or two a month.
The catch is that “no cut at this time” is a launch price, not a contract. Every platform in this space has repriced once it had supply locked in: Patreon moved new creators to a higher fee, and beehiiv raised its plans while keeping its 0% headline. Price your business so it still works if LinkedIn adds a percentage later.
When does the money actually arrive?
This is the detail most coverage skipped. LinkedIn’s help page states plainly: “Payouts are delayed by 30 days to support issue resolution.“
Add that to the 30-day booking window and the timeline stretches. Someone books you today for a slot four weeks out; the session happens; then the money sits for another 30 days. Your first dollars can land close to two months after your first $59.99 subscription charge. For a side income that is fine. For someone using consulting revenue to cover rent while they build a practice, it is a cash-flow gap worth planning around.
What happens with cancellations and no-shows?
The Advice Sessions FAQ sets these rules during the beta:
- If the host cancels, at any point, the booker is refunded, including the Stripe fee.
- If the booker cancels at least 24 hours ahead, they can get a refund but still absorb the Stripe fee.
- Late cancellations and no-shows do not trigger an automatic refund. Either side reports an issue within 5 days of the meeting date and LinkedIn Support reviews it.
- The FAQ also says it is “the responsibility of the Host to refund the booker if there is a cancellation.”
In other words, LinkedIn handles the plumbing but not the policy. You still need your own written terms (what the session covers, what happens if the client shows up 20 minutes late, whether a follow-up email is included). LinkedIn’s checkout will not write those for you.
Is it worth paying for if you already use Calendly and Stripe?
It depends on where your buyers come from. Here is the trade, laid out plainly:
| Advice Sessions | Your own booking stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $59.99 Premium Business | Calendly or similar, plus Stripe fees |
| Platform cut | 0% “at this time” | 0% |
| Payout timing | Held 30 days | Stripe’s normal schedule |
| Who sees the button | Anyone viewing your LinkedIn profile | Whoever reaches your site or link |
| Who owns the client relationship | LinkedIn mediates booking and support | You do |
The real value is not the payment rails; it is the button sitting on the profile where buyers already vet you. LinkedIn says more than 80% of its creators make content alongside another role, which is exactly the person who benefits from turning profile visits into paid calls without building a separate site.
But a button is not demand. Ermos Erotocritou, who runs an acquisition academy for financial advisors, warned in the Advisor.ca piece that it “may not automatically lead to … like five free leads a day,” and recommended posting consistently and offering free first calls before expecting paid bookings. If nobody is visiting your profile now, Advice Sessions will not change that. The groundwork is the same content strategy we covered in how B2B creators earn on LinkedIn.
What should you charge, and what should a session lead to?
LinkedIn does not set your price. PPC Land’s launch coverage showed a sample consultation listed at $80, and a setup guide from Launchvibes reports a $500 ceiling per session, so the range is wide.
The better question is what the session is for. A single paid call is the hourly model, and hourly is the layer of coaching that is easiest to undercut. We argued in the $200 session versus the $5,000 program that defined-outcome programs hold their value far better than open-ended advice. Used well, an Advice Session is a paid diagnostic: a buyer pays $150 to $300 to find out whether you can solve their problem, and the good ones convert into a scoped project or a program priced on the outcome.
Two practical moves follow from that:
- Name the deliverable in the listing. “45-minute pricing review of your consulting offer, with a written summary” sells better than “1 hour of advice,” and it also gives you a clean answer when someone disputes what they paid for.
- Move the relationship off-platform after the call. Send the summary by email, from your own address, with a link to your next offer. The booking happened on LinkedIn; the client list should live with you. A platform that holds your payout for 30 days and has not committed to its fee should not also be the only place your clients exist.
Advice Sessions is a genuinely useful piece of plumbing for anyone whose buyers already find them on LinkedIn. Treat it as a front door with a deposit box attached, not as the business itself.