Clay review (2026): pricing, credits, pros and cons

What Clay is

Clay is a spreadsheet-style platform for building and enriching lead lists and automating what happens to them. Each row is a company or a person, each column a step: pull a list from an audience, enrich an email through a waterfall of providers, have Claygent, its AI agent, research a company from the web, watch for a job change or a funding round, then push the result to a CRM, an ad platform or a sequencer. It has become the hub of the modern outbound stack, to the point that the job title GTM engineer exists largely to describe the people who build on it. The company says it works with more than 150 data providers and, according to the New York Times, let employees sell shares at a $5 billion valuation.

Clay pricing

Clay bills two things. Data credits are spent when you buy data through its marketplace, such as an email, a phone number or firmographics from one of the providers; bring your own API key for a provider and you skip them. Actions are the platform work on every row, routing the request, calling the provider, running the step and writing the result, at under a cent each. Every plan includes an allowance of both, and each can be expanded on its own.

The free plan includes 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, unlimited seats and tables, waterfalls, Claygent and the Clay Sequencer, capped at 200 rows per table and without phone enrichment. Launch starts at $185 a month on monthly billing, which is 15,000 actions at $60 plus 2,500 data credits at $125, or $167 a month billed yearly for 180,000 actions and 30,000 data credits a year; it adds phone enrichment, signals, email campaign integrations and tables of up to 50,000 rows. Growth starts at $495 a month, 40,000 actions at $205 plus 6,000 data credits at $290, or $446 billed yearly, and adds CRM auto-sync, HTTP API integrations, webhooks, web intent, ad audiences, the ability to buy domains and inboxes for the Clay Sequencer, and priority support. Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment and starts from 100,000 data credits and 200,000 actions a month. Expansion is published: actions up to 200,000 a month for $540 and data credits up to 50,000 a month for $2,125, with yearly tiers about 10 percent cheaper.

The rules around credits matter. Yearly plans receive all credits up front. Data credits roll over up to a month’s worth on monthly plans and 15 percent of the annual allowance on yearly plans; actions reset each cycle. Top-ups cost a 30 percent premium. The terms say subscriptions renew at Clay’s current rates unless cancelled before renewal, and publish no refund policy.

How it works

Start a table from a search, a CSV, a CRM sync or one of Clay’s audiences, then add columns. An email waterfall asks provider after provider until one returns an address and charges credits only for the hit. Claygent reads websites, LinkedIn and news to answer a question you write in plain language. Signals watch for job changes, promotions, new hires, funding and web intent and can start a workflow when they fire. Functions let you reuse logic across tables. Outputs go to HubSpot or Salesforce, to email campaign tools, to ad platforms as audiences, to any HTTP API or webhook, to Clay’s own sequencer, or to an AI assistant through the MCP server.

Who Clay is for, and who should look elsewhere

Clay suits outbound teams and agencies that want one place to build lists, enrich across providers, run AI research and push to a sequencer, and that have someone willing to build and maintain the tables. It is a poor fit for teams that want a simple finder at a flat price, or anyone unwilling to learn a spreadsheet-style workflow tool. Apollo.io bundles a database, a finder and a sequencer at a published per-seat price, and ZoomInfo sells the enterprise database Clay often queries. The enrichment category and the lead data category list every tool we have reviewed with its score.

Using Clay with PureMail

Clay builds the list; the inboxes carry the reputation. Enrich and verify in Clay, then push to the email campaign tool where your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 inboxes from PureMail are connected, or send through the Clay Sequencer, for which the Growth plan sells domains and inboxes of its own. Either way, verify what the waterfall returns, since provider data varies, and keep daily volumes per inbox conservative.