Clay Pricing in 2026: Credits, Plans, and Real Costs

Clay pricing confuses people for a specific reason. The number on the pricing page is the sum of two independent sliders, and the two things those sliders buy behave nothing alike. 

We build in Clay every week for clients, so this breakdown covers what each of the Clay pricing tiers includes, what a credit actually buys, and which teams should not be paying for Clay at all.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

• What it is: Clay is a data enrichment and workflow tool where you build GTM automations as tables, pulling from more than 150 data providers in one place.

• Best for: Small outbound teams and RevOps functions that need enriched, scored, CRM-ready data and have someone willing to learn the tool properly.

• Standout feature: Multi-provider waterfalls, which try one data vendor after another on the same record until one returns a result, so coverage beats any single vendor.

• Biggest limitation: The credit model rewards people who understand it and quietly penalizes people who do not, and the learning curve is steep enough that most teams overspend for their first two months.

• Pricing: Paid Clay plans start at $185 per month for Launch and $495 per month for Growth, both billed monthly, with roughly 10% off on annual billing. There is a permanent free plan and a separate 14-day trial.

• Best alternative: If the cost sits in how the workflows are built, an embedded GTM engineer is the fix, because no cheaper tool solves a routing problem. If you need fewer moving parts, Apollo and Clearbit cover narrower jobs.

• The verdict: Clay is worth paying for when enrichment feeds a system you actually run, and it is expensive dead weight when nobody owns the build. Buy Launch to learn, buy Growth for the CRM sync, and do not touch Enterprise until your volume forces it.

Table of Contents

1. Clay Pricing at a Glance

2. What Is Clay, and What Are You Paying For?

3. Clay Pricing Plans and Costs in 2026

4. Why the Clay.com Pricing Page Shows Two Different Prices

5. Clay Credits Pricing: Data Credits vs Action Credits

6. Clay Credit Costs: What a Real Workflow Consumes

7. Where Teams Overspend on Clay

8. Which Clay Plan Fits Your Team

9. Is Clay Worth It? The Good and the Bad

10. Clay Pricing Alternatives Worth Comparing

11. Clay Pricing: Everything You Need to Know

12. FAQs About Clay Pricing

Clay Pricing at a Glance

What Is Clay, and What Are You Paying For?

Clay is a table-based tool for finding, enriching, and acting on go-to-market data. You import a list of companies or people, add columns that call data providers or AI models, and push the results into a CRM or a sequencer. 

The company operates a data marketplace, so instead of signing contracts with a dozen vendors, you buy from all of them through one account.

That marketplace is the thing you are paying for, and it is also why the pricing looks unusual. Clay is reselling other companies' data alongside its own orchestration, and the bill separates those two costs on purpose. The company has scale behind it, and the companies that use Clay increasingly run it as core infrastructure. 

Clay published that it reached $100M ARR in 2026, and reported that its "enterprise net revenue retention is over 200%." Those are the numbers of a tool that expands inside accounts once teams commit, which matters when you are forecasting what your own Clay subscription cost looks like in year two.

Most teams meet Clay through enrichment, then stay for the orchestration. That progression is exactly what the credit model is designed to capture, and it is where our Clay automation work usually starts.

Clay Pricing Plans and Costs in 2026

Clay rebuilt its pricing in March 2026, replacing the old Starter, Explorer, and Pro tiers with four packages and a two-currency credit system. Here is what the current Clay plans include.

Free Plan and the Clay Free Trial

Clay runs a permanent free plan and a separate free trial, and conflating the two is the most common mistake we see. The free plan never expires. It gives you 100 data credits and 500 actions a month, unlimited seats and tables, and caps tables at 200 rows.

The Clay free trial is a different product. According to Clay's own FAQ, the trial gives you "access to the features from our Growth plan and 2,000 credits to test Clay out," with tables limited to 50 rows and up to 10,000 actions, for 14 days.

Use the trial to test whether the Growth features matter to you, because that is the only window where you get CRM sync without paying for it. Use the free plan afterwards to keep a sandbox alive.

Launch Plan: $185 per Month

Launch is the entry point for paid Clay, at $185 per month billed monthly or $167 per month billed annually. It includes 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions.

Launch unlocks the things the free plan withholds: phone number enrichment, job change and hiring signals, custom functions you can reuse across workflows, and sending through an external sequencer. Tables scale to 50,000 rows.

Both meters expand inside the plan. Actions scale up to 200,000 a month and data credits up to 50,000 a month, which is the same ceiling Growth offers. What Launch limits is the feature set, and that changes the upgrade decision entirely.

Growth Plan: $495 per Month

Growth costs $495 per month billed monthly, or $446 billed annually, and includes 6,000 data credits and 40,000 actions. The headline gap between Launch and Growth reads as $310 a month, which is misleading.

Compare the two at the same volume instead. The clay.com pricing page publishes the price of every slider position, and on Launch, 40,000 actions costs $150 while 6,000 data credits costs $290, for $440 a month. The identical volume on Growth is $495. The real premium for the Growth feature set is $55 a month at that tier.

What that $55 buys is the integration layer: CRM auto-sync and enrichment, data warehouse sync, HTTP API integrations, webhook automation, web intent signals, unlimited ad audiences, and priority support. 

Most of our clients start here, because CRM cleanup is usually the first job and CRM auto-sync is the gate. The setup itself is documented in our walkthrough on how to connect HubSpot to Clay.

One caveat applies as you scale. The action price on Growth runs higher than Launch at every tier, so the premium widens with volume. At 100,000 actions a month, the same configuration costs $580 on Launch and $740 on Growth.

Enterprise: Custom Annual Pricing

Clay does not publish Enterprise pricing. The page lists it as custom with an annual commitment, starting at 100,000+ data credits and 200,000+ actions per month.

For a reference point, procurement data from Vendr shows the median Clay buyer pays $45,250 per year across 82 purchases, with contracts ranging from $16,200 to $152,100. In the engagements we have scoped, quotes generally open in the mid-five figures and climb from there.

Enterprise buys four things the self-serve plans cannot: bulk enrichment of companies, people, and jobs in a single pass instead of row by row through a table; SSO and role-based access control with workbook-level credit budgets; unlimited imports from your CRM or warehouse; and a dedicated growth strategist plus a shared Slack channel.

That last item is worth more than it sounds. The strategist gives your team direction on what to build, which is the gap most teams hit around month three.

Legacy Plans: Starter, Explorer, and Pro

If you signed up before March 2026, you may still be on Starter, Explorer, or Pro. Those plans use a single credit currency rather than the data credit and action split.

Several articles ranking for Clay pricing still quote those legacy tiers as current. Check your billing page before you compare your bill to anything you read, including this article.

Why the Clay.com Pricing Page Shows Two Different Prices

The pricing page shows $167 for Launch while Clay's own FAQ says Launch starts at $185. Both are correct. The card defaults to annual billing, and the FAQ quotes the monthly rate.

Underneath that, the price is built from two independent sliders, and understanding this is the single most useful thing about reading Clay's pricing. You pick an action volume and a data credit volume separately, and the plan price is the sum.

On monthly billing, Launch is 15,000 actions at $60 plus 2,500 data credits at $125, which is the $185 headline. Growth is 40,000 actions at $205 plus 6,000 data credits at $290, which is $495. On annual billing, the same positions cost $54 plus $113 for Launch, and $185 plus $261 for Growth, producing the $167 and $446 figures on the card.

The practical consequence is that you can tune the two meters against each other. A team bringing its own data vendor API keys needs almost no data credits and a lot of actions. A team buying everything through Clay's marketplace needs the reverse. Most teams accept the default pairing and pay for capacity on the wrong meter.

Clay Credits Pricing: Data Credits vs Action Credits

Clay charges in two currencies, and the difference between them decides most of your bill.

What a Data Credit Buys

A data credit buys a data point from Clay's marketplace: an email address, a phone number, a company firmographic, a LinkedIn profile. You are purchasing information from Clay or from one of its 150+ third-party partners.

Clay states that data credits "start at $0.05 each and become more cost-effective as you grow." If you run an email waterfall or a phone waterfall and you do not hold API keys with those vendors yourself, every attempt draws from this pool.

What an Action Credit Meters

An action meters the work Clay does on your behalf. Clay defines actions as covering "routing your request, calling the provider, running your workflow, and returning the result to your table," and prices them at under a cent each.

Running a Clay agent, making an HTTP API call, pushing a record to your CRM, exporting an audience, sending an email: each of those is an action. Clay's documentation is explicit that "each record enriched or exported counts as 1 Action, regardless of data source or provider."

This is Clay's hedge. If you bring your own API keys for every data vendor and use Clay purely as an orchestration layer, you pay almost nothing in data credits, and the action meter is how Clay still charges you for the tool. Once you understand that, the plan sizing decision becomes obvious: the more you optimize your data spend, the more your action tier becomes the real constraint.

What Clay Does Not Charge For

Three things are free, and they change how you should design workflows. Failed enrichments cost nothing, so a waterfall that misses on four providers before hitting on the fifth only bills for the hit. Sourcing lists of accounts or contacts inside Clay costs neither meter. 

CRM imports into Clay are also free, which means pulling your entire Salesforce instance in to audit it is a zero-cost operation.

Clay formulas and filters are free too. Any calculation you can do with a formula instead of an AI column is a straight saving.

Clay Credit Costs: What a Real Workflow Consumes

Clay's documentation gives a worked example that is more useful than any pricing table. Enriching 100 contacts with LinkedIn profiles and emails costs "50 Data Credits (0.5 per profile)" for the profiles and "45 Data Credits (0.5 per email × 90)" at a 90% hit rate, for 95 data credits total. Bring your own email provider key and the same job drops to 50 credits.

In our own workspaces, the two enrichments we run most often, company enrichment and contact enrichment, both land at that same 0.5 credit level. That is the number to anchor on when you estimate a build.

Here is how that scales against the plan allowances.

The pattern holds across client builds: contact-level work costs roughly twice what company-level work costs, and phone numbers cost more than everything else combined. If your bill surprised you, phone enrichment is the first place to look.

Actions rarely bind first on the self-serve plans. Clay says it sized Launch and Growth so "90% of our customers will never hit a usage limit." Data credits run out long before actions do, unless you are running high-frequency CRM syncs.

Where Teams Overspend on Clay

Four things account for most of the waste we find when we audit a client's Clay workspace.

• Topping up instead of upgrading. Clay charges a 30% premium on credit top-ups for Launch and Growth. If you top up more than once in a quarter, the next slider position is cheaper than the top-ups you are buying.

• Paying for data you already own. Connecting your own API keys removes the data credit cost entirely, though the action still counts. Teams with existing Apollo, Prospeo, or LeadMagic contracts are often paying twice for the same record. The fastest way to save Clay credits is to audit which vendors you already pay for before you buy a single marketplace credit.

• Re-running enrichments that already have answers. Without a conditional check, a scheduled workflow re-enriches records that are already complete. Adding a "only run if this field is empty" condition typically cuts a recurring workflow's spend by half.

• Buying the wrong meter. Because actions and data credits scale independently, a team that has moved most enrichment to its own keys is often sitting on 20,000 unused data credits while hitting the action ceiling every month. Check which meter you exhaust first before you move tier.

Data credits do roll over, up to twice your monthly allowance on Launch and Growth, so a slow month is not lost money. Actions reset every billing cycle and do not roll over.

Which Clay Plan Fits Your Team

Solo Founder Doing Founder-Led Outbound

Start free, then move to Launch when the 200-row table cap gets in your way. At 100 data credits a month, the free plan enriches roughly 100 company records, which is enough to prove the tool works and not enough to run a campaign.

You do not need Growth. Without a CRM to sync, you are paying $310 a month for integrations you cannot use.

Small Outbound Team Learning the Tool

Launch is built for you. The $185 tier covers phone enrichment, job change signals, and sequencer integrations, and it scales to the same volume ceiling as Growth.

Budget for a learning period. Most teams burn their first month's credits on experiments that never ship, which is normal and worth planning for rather than discovering. Working from proven Clay workflow templates shortens that period considerably.

RevOps Team With a CRM to Clean

Start on Growth. CRM auto-sync is the feature that turns Clay from a list-building tool into infrastructure, and it is gated behind this tier.

This is where most of our clients begin. The typical first project is a golden enrichment table that keeps every account record current, which requires the CRM sync and the HTTP API that Growth unlocks. Budget credits for the CRM data hygiene backfill separately, because a one-time cleanup of a messy instance costs more than the steady state that follows. 

If you are choosing between tools at this stage, our Clay vs Apollo comparison covers the trade-off.

Enterprise GTM Org

Enterprise, once your volume has earned it. The features that justify the contract are bulk enrichment, SSO, RBAC with workbook-level credit budgets, and warehouse integration, and none of those matter until you have proven the workflows.

Signal to watch: when you are running the same enrichment across tens of thousands of records and hitting the 50,000-row bulk limit, the volume has decided for you. Scoring work compounds this, since a Clay lead scoring model re-runs every time an account record changes.

Agencies and Clay Consultants

Growth per client workspace, usually. The action tier matters more than the data credit tier here, because agency work is orchestration-heavy and most agencies bring their own vendor keys.

If you are hiring rather than building this capability, our guide to how to choose a Clay consultant covers what to screen for, and our roundup of Clay experts lists the operators worth following.

Is Clay Worth It? The Good and the Bad

Clay is worth it when someone owns the build. Bought as a tool a rep will figure out between calls, it becomes an expensive list habit within a quarter. Public reviews run consistently positive on capability and consistently critical on cost predictability, which matches what we see in client workspaces.

Where Clay's Pricing Works

• Failed lookups are free. Waterfalls only bill on hits, so chasing 95% coverage across five providers costs the same as chasing 60% from one. Few competitors price this way.

• Your own API keys are supported. Any vendor contract you already hold removes the data credit cost on that enrichment, so Clay never forces marketplace margin on data you have already bought.

• The two meters scale independently. Cutting your data spend leaves your orchestration bill untouched, and the reverse holds too.

• Data credits roll over. Up to 2x your monthly allowance on Launch and Growth, so seasonal campaign volume does not strand budget.

• No per-seat charge. Seats and tables are unlimited on every plan, including free, which is unusual in this category.

Where Clay's Pricing Hurts

• The learning curve is expensive. The credit model punishes experimentation before you understand it, and most teams spend their first month paying tuition.

• Top-ups carry a 30% premium. The pricing pushes you toward a higher tier instead of flexible overage, which is fine if you plan and costly if you do not.

• CRM sync is gated behind Growth. If a CRM integration is the reason you bought Clay, the entry price is $495 rather than $185.

• Enterprise pricing is opaque. With a published median of $45,250 a year and a range reaching $152,100, you cannot forecast the jump without a sales conversation.

• Cost depends on architecture as much as usage. Two teams enriching identical volumes can pay double or half of each other, which is the part nobody tells you at signup.

Clay Pricing Alternatives Worth Comparing

If Clay looks expensive, diagnose the cause before you switch tools. The cost is usually a build problem, and switching vendors carries it with you. A wider survey of substitutes sits in our roundup of data enrichment tools.

1. The GTM Engineering Company: Best for Cost-Engineered Builds

Disclosure first: we build in Clay for clients every week, and Clay sits in our own stack alongside HubSpot, Salesforce, and the vendors below. We are not selling you a Clay replacement. We get called in when the bill stops making sense.

The sequence we use with clients is deliberate. Start on a self-serve plan to test the logic, test the data quality, and count how many enrichment steps your accounts and contacts actually need. Only move into Enterprise once the volume forces it. Buying capacity before you know that number is how teams end up on an annual commitment they use a third of.

The savings come from architecture. On one engagement, we routed lead classification through an OpenAI key instead of Clay's data credits and processed 18,000 leads for roughly $38. The same client's public Slate case study covers the Salesforce side of that build, where 48,703 of 65,107 open leads were enriched. That number came from routing the work to the cheaper meter on the plan the client already had.

A typical engagement runs 3 to 6 months at 5 to 10 hours a week, priced monthly at $5,000 for Starter and $7,000 for Growth, with Enterprise scoped custom. A GTM stack audit is included in every tier, and no build starts on a data foundation we have not audited. 

Every system ships with a written runbook and a recorded walkthrough, built under your logins, so your team can operate it after we leave. More builds are documented in our Clay GTM case studies.

If your Clay bill is growing faster than your pipeline, book a 30-minute call, and we will audit where the credits are going.

2. Apollo: Best for Teams That Want Data and Sequencing in One Bill

Apollo sells access to its own database plus the tooling around it. Its site describes providing "a sequencing platform that allows you to A/B test your emails, record your calls, automate your follow-ups," and an Opportunities feature to "manage your sales pipeline," so a small team gets prospecting and sending under one subscription.

The structural difference is where the data comes from. Apollo serves records from its own database, while Clay buys from 150+ providers and stacks them in a waterfall. 

For teams whose match rates are already good enough on one source, Apollo is the simpler bill. Teams usually move when coverage gaps start costing them meetings.

3. Clearbit: Best for Inbound Enrichment Inside HubSpot

Clearbit's own site now opens with "Clearbit has joined HubSpot," and the product is pitched at enriching records and inbound traffic: enriching every lead, contact, and account, scoring and routing them, and turning "anonymous website traffic into real buying intent signals." If your motion is inbound-heavy and you already run HubSpot, it covers that job with far less setup than Clay.

The difference is scope. Clearbit is one data source pointed at records you already have, where Clay is a marketplace plus an orchestration layer for records you go and find. For most teams, it sits alongside Clay rather than replacing it.

4. ZoomInfo: Best for Enterprise Teams That Want One Vendor

ZoomInfo sells a large proprietary database with intent data on top, bought as an annual contract rather than a self-serve subscription. Buyers pick it for procurement simplicity and for depth in North America, and it is a tool we work in regularly on client stacks.

ZoomInfo does not publish its prices, so budget for a sales cycle and a quote rather than a slider. Against Clay, the trade is coverage from one committed source against flexibility across many, which is why plenty of teams run both and point Clay at ZoomInfo through an API key.

5. Prospeo and LeadMagic: Best as Cheaper Inputs Into Clay

These are single-purpose enrichment vendors for emails and phone numbers, and both are tools we already run in client stacks. Buying from one directly and connecting the API key to Clay is often cheaper than buying the same record as marketplace data credits.

The arithmetic is checkable. Clay's data credits start at $0.05 each, and a found email costs 0.5 credits, so roughly $0.025 per email at the floor rate. 

LeadMagic prices its Email Finder at "1 credit/valid email" with credits from $0.007, and $0.0204 per credit on its entry plan. Both vendors charge nothing on a failed match, and so does Clay.

Their value here is as inputs. Feeding Clay from a contract you already hold cuts the marketplace spend without changing a single workflow. If you have concluded Clay itself is the wrong fit, our list of Clay alternatives covers full substitutes.

Clay Pricing: Everything You Need to Know

FAQs About Clay Pricing

How much does Clay cost?

Clay costs $185 per month for the Launch plan and $495 per month for the Growth plan on monthly billing, dropping to $167 and $446 on annual billing. Launch includes 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions a month, and Growth includes 6,000 data credits and 40,000 actions. There is a free plan at $0 with 100 data credits and 500 actions. Enterprise pricing is custom with an annual commitment. Both paid plans let you increase either meter without changing tier, up to 50,000 data credits and 200,000 actions a month.

Is Clay worth it?

Clay is worth it if someone on your team owns the build and you are enriching data that feeds a system you actually run. The tool earns its cost through waterfall coverage and failed lookups being free, which means chasing 95% match rates across five providers costs the same as chasing 60% from one. It is poor value when nobody owns it, because the credits get spent on experiments that never reach production. Teams enriching fewer than about 500 records a month rarely justify the $185 entry price. Ownership decides the break-even more than volume does.

Does Clay have a free plan or a free trial?

Clay has both a permanent free plan and a separate 14-day free trial, and they are different products. The free plan never expires and gives you 100 data credits, 500 actions a month, unlimited seats and tables, and a 200-row cap per table. The Clay free trial gives you Growth plan features and 2,000 credits for 14 days, with tables capped at 50 rows and 10,000 actions. Use the trial to test CRM sync and the integrations Growth unlocks. Use the free plan afterwards as a permanent sandbox.

What are Clay credits and how does credit pricing work?

Clay credits come in two types: data credits buy information, and actions meter the work Clay performs. Data credits start at $0.05 each and are spent when you purchase an email, phone number, or company record from Clay's marketplace of 150+ providers. Actions cost under a cent each and are consumed when Clay runs a table, calls an AI model, syncs to your CRM, or exports data, at one action per record. Connecting your own vendor API key removes the data credit cost but still consumes an action. Failed enrichments charge neither.

How much does Clay Enterprise cost?

Clay Enterprise pricing is custom and requires an annual commitment, so no list price exists. Procurement data published by Vendr puts the median Clay buyer at $45,250 per year across 82 purchases, with contracts ranging from $16,200 to $152,100. The tier starts at 100,000+ data credits and 200,000+ actions per month. What you are buying beyond volume is bulk enrichment, SSO, role-based access control with workbook-level credit budgets, warehouse integration, and a dedicated growth strategist. Most teams should stay on self-serve until row volume forces the move.

Should I choose the Launch or Growth plan?

Choose Launch unless you need a CRM integration, in which case choose Growth. Launch at $185 covers phone enrichment, job change signals, and sequencing, and it scales to the same 200,000 action and 50,000 data credit ceiling as Growth. Growth at $495 adds CRM auto-sync, HTTP API integrations, webhooks, web intent signals, and priority support. Compared at matched volume of 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits, Growth costs $55 a month more than Launch, so features decide this one, not capacity.

What happens when you run out of Clay credits?

When you run out of Clay credits, enrichments stop running until you top up or move to a higher tier. Top-ups on Launch and Growth carry a 30% premium over your plan rate, which makes them expensive as a habit. If you top up more than once a quarter, the next slider position costs less than the top-ups. Unused data credits roll over up to twice your monthly allowance on Launch and Growth, while actions reset each billing cycle and do not roll over. Enterprise customers can roll over up to 15% of the prior year's purchased credits on renewal.

Who should not pay for Clay?

Teams without anyone to own the build should not pay for Clay, regardless of budget. The tool assumes someone will design the workflows, tune the waterfalls, and monitor credit consumption, and it degrades into an expensive list-buying habit without that person. Pre-product-market-fit startups are a poor fit, because Clay scales a motion that already works. Teams needing only verified emails will pay less buying from a single vendor directly. If your entire use case is enriching inbound form fills, a native CRM enrichment tool covers it for less.

About the Author

Jorge B. Macías is the founder of The GTM Engineering Company, a fractional go-to-market engineering team that builds enrichment, scoring, signal-based outbound, and attribution inside the CRM a client already owns. He came up through B2B software sales, spending more than three years at BrainHi as its second sales hire and moving from SDR to Account Executive into Revenue Operations, then sales roles at Reprise and Offsite. He is an industrial engineer by training.

Named builds on the company's case studies page include Spara, Fluint, Trumpet, Slate, NodeSource, IAG Real Estate, and Modern GTM. He hosts every 30-minute intro call himself. Connect with him on LinkedIn.