The most common reason people buy Sales Navigator is the one it does not deliver. It does not raise your connection limits, it does not make your messages more deliverable, and it does not lower your ban risk. A Sales Navigator seat is a search-and-list tool, not a deliverability upgrade. Once you see it that way, the decision gets simple.

Here is what it actually changes, what it leaves exactly as it was, and how to tell which side of the line your outreach is on.

What Sales Navigator actually changes

Search, by a wide margin. Many more filters (seniority, function, headcount, recent job changes, posted-on-LinkedIn) and the ability to save them as live lead lists. This is the real product.
No commercial-use search wall. Free accounts hit a monthly limit where search results truncate hard. Sales Navigator removes that ceiling. For a lot of people this single fact is the whole reason to pay.
InMail credits. A monthly allotment (typically around 50) to message people you are not connected to, refilled when they respond.
Lead and account tracking. Saved leads, alerts on job changes and posts, a separate inbox for InMail conversations.

What it does not change

Connection request limits. The same per-day and rolling-weekly caps apply. A paid seat does not buy you more invites.
Ban and restriction risk. Sending patterns are what get accounts flagged. Sales Navigator does not make aggressive behavior safe, and bursts on a paid account get restricted the same as on a free one.
Deliverability to your 1st-degree network. Messaging people you are already connected to works identically on both. If your audience is your existing network, you are paying for filters you may not need.

The commercial-use limit, the thing nobody mentions until it bites

Free LinkedIn has a hidden monthly cap on search. Hit it and your results truncate, often to around three first-page results from the usual ten, and a banner tells you to upgrade. It resets monthly. If you prospect by searching, this is the wall you actually run into, and it is the cleanest reason Sales Navigator pays for itself. We get into the mechanics in LinkedIn’s daily limits, demystified.

InMail: useful, but narrower than it looks

InMail only earns its keep for people outside your network who are worth a credit. For anyone you can connect with and message for free, an InMail is a worse version of a free message that also costs you a credit. Conversion rates on InMail have declined steadily since 2022. Treat it as a tool for the out-of-network prospect who will not accept a connection request, not as your default channel.

When the free account is genuinely enough

You already have a defined list of targets and are not prospecting by search.
Your audience is mostly your existing 1st-degree network.
You are working a few hundred well-chosen people, not searching continuously.
You are warming a new account and should be moving slowly anyway.

When Sales Navigator earns its price

You prospect by search and keep hitting the commercial-use wall.
You need the advanced filters and saved lead lists to build your audience at all.
A real part of your outreach is to out-of-network people worth an InMail.

What Marno does with either

Marno works on a free or a Sales Navigator account, because the limits that keep an account alive are the same on both and that is where the automation has to be careful. If you have a Sales Navigator seat, Marno can run searches against its filters, work the Sales Navigator inbox, and send InMail and open-profile messages where they make sense. If you are on a free account, the connect-and-sequence motion is identical, just bounded by the search wall. Pick the account that fits your prospecting; the safety defaults do not change either way.