Clay pricing in 2026, and what a Clay alternative costs instead

Clay is the GTM data table most teams compare everything else to, and Tulina sells a product that does part of what Clay does. That is declared here so you can weigh the rest. This page quotes Clay's prices from Clay's own pricing page and credits guide, read on 26 October 2026, says what Clay does well and who should stay on it, sorts Clay's competitors and alternatives by the job each one replaces, and then shows the job Clay is paid for done another way, including with Tulina. It is about the Clay at clay.com; if you arrived from a search about pottery, this is not your page. If your question is whether Clay's own agents can run the work, see Is Clay built for AI agents?

Prices move. Where Clay's pages disagree with each other, both figures are given with their billing basis, and nothing below is a guess about what Clay will charge next quarter.

What are the current Clay pricing plans?

Clay's current plans are Free, Launch, Growth and Enterprise. The pricing cards show the annual-billing figure ($167 and $446 a month); the FAQ on the same page gives the monthly-billing figure ("starting at $185/mo" and "$495/mo"). Both are on clay.com/pricing as of 26 October 2026.

Two things the table cannot show. First, Clay changed its plans in 2026: its credits guide now refers to "legacy plans", and two of the guides ranking for this search (Warmly, CloudEagle) still describe the older Starter, Explorer and Pro tiers, which Valley and Landbase say were grandfathered in March 2026. If you are on one of those, the numbers above are not your bill. Second, Clay's pricing calculator sizes a plan from accounts and contacts a month, which is the right way to read it: the plan is a bundle of two meters, not a seat price.

How does Clay pricing work?

Clay charges for two things at once: actions, which measure the platform work (enriching a row, running an AI step, sending a record to another tool), and data credits, which buy data or AI from the providers in Clay's marketplace. Every enrichment of a row spends one action plus a variable number of data credits, and the rules differ for each meter. All of the following is from Clay's Actions and Data Credits guide and pricing FAQ, read on 26 October 2026.

What does not cost an action: sourcing a list, importing from a CRM or a warehouse, formulas and filters, moving rows between Clay tables, and CSV export. That matters for the arithmetic: a workflow that sources, filters, then enriches once is cheap; a workflow that runs four or five enrichment and export steps on every row is not, and the actions meter is the one you cannot top up.

AI is priced two ways. Most models cost a fixed number of data credits a task; the token-heavy ones (Clay's page names GPT-5.1 and Claude 4.6 Sonnet) are billed on the tokens consumed, with no markup, and show an estimate marked with a tilde before the run. Clay says runs on its own keys are twice as fast as runs on yours, because of the rate limits it has negotiated.

How much does Clay charge for an enriched contact?

Clay's guide puts a fully enriched record at 6 to 20 data credits, plus one action per enrichment step. At the $0.05 starting price, that is $0.30 to $1.00 of data credits per contact for the data alone, before the plan and before actions.

Clay's own worked example: 100 contacts found in Clay's database (0 credits), LinkedIn profiles enriched at 0.5 credit each (50), emails found at 0.5 credit each on a 90% hit rate (45), and email validation on a free validator (0), so 95 data credits in all, or 50 if your own email provider's key covers the email step. Each of those enrichment steps also spends one action per row.

Scaled to a plan, with Clay's figures:

• Launch's 2,500 data credits cover roughly 125 fully enriched contacts a month at 20 credits each, or about 415 at 6, before any top-up at the 30% premium. Clay's guide sizes Launch at "about 1,000 records a month", which assumes most rows take far less than a full enrichment, or your own keys.
• Launch's 15,000 actions cover 3,000 to 3,750 rows a month at four or five steps per row. That is the arithmetic one commenter did in the r/gtmengineering thread Is Clay still worth it after the new pricing changes?, where the original poster runs 3,000 to 4,000 enrichments a month on their own keys and finds the actions, not the data, is what grew.
• Growth's 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits are the plan for a team whose workflow also pushes to a CRM or an HTTP endpoint on every row, since each of those is an action and neither integration exists below Growth.

The honest reading of the thread is not that Clay became expensive. It is that Clay's bill now tracks orchestration, so a team whose workflow has stopped changing pays for flexibility it has stopped using. Several commenters moved exactly those stable workflows out and kept Clay for the exploratory ones.

What Clay does well, and who should stay on it

Clay does three things better than anything on the alternatives lists, and this page would be dishonest without saying so.

• The marketplace. 150+ data and AI providers behind one interface, with a waterfall that tries them in order without code. If your target market changes every quarter, or spans geographies where a different provider wins each time, that breadth is the product.
• The table. A spreadsheet any operator on the team can read, with AI columns (Claygent) that research the web per row. Non-technical GTM teams build real workflows in it; that is why there is a job title called GTM engineer.
• Signals and integrations, from Launch and Growth. Job changes, company news, web intent, webhooks on any signal, CRM auto-sync, ad audiences, and native warehouse connections. The same page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.

Stay on Clay if your workflows are still being discovered, if the people building them live in a spreadsheet rather than a chat or a code editor, if you push audiences to ads, or if you need the Enterprise admin layer (SSO, role-based access, per-workbook credit budgets). The Free plan, with 200 rows a table and unlimited seats, is also the cheapest way to learn what a waterfall is before building one anywhere else.

How do you run the Clay waterfall job without Clay?

You run the same cascade on your own providers' APIs, with a table and something that walks its rows. The commenters in the thread above did it with n8n, with a script Claude Code wrote, and with a direct data API; the steps are the same whichever you choose. This is honest enough to follow without Tulina.

1. Attribute your Clay bill by table before anything else. Clay's Usage page breaks actions and data credits down by workbook and table. One commenter found two of six tables burned most of the actions, both multi-step waterfalls. Move those two; keep the rest.
2. Pick the two or three providers that cover your market, and take your own API keys. Clay's own guide says your keys cut data credits by 50 to 80%, and outside Clay they cut the actions to zero. Each provider now bills you directly, so you will see three invoices instead of one.
3. Put the list in a table with a row id, the inputs and a status column. Inputs are a LinkedIn URL, or a name and a company domain. A row with neither is marked, not dropped.
4. Qualify before you enrich. Filter on the fields you already hold (role, company size, country) and send only the rows that pass to a paid call. Clay's own cost tips say the same thing; outside Clay nobody enforces it but you.
5. Run the cascade, first hit wins. Provider A; if the field comes back empty, provider B; stop at the first hit. Write the provider's name next to the value, so the table says where every email came from.
6. Verify, then push, as separate steps. Email verification is its own call and its own cost. Writing to the CRM or the sequencer is a deliberate step after the table is clean, never a side effect of enrichment.
7. Schedule it and watch cost per step, not per month. A run that finds nothing new should cost nothing; a step that is skipped because its input is empty should cost nothing.

What this costs you instead of money: the thread is candid that the maintenance moves to you. Rate limits, a provider changing its API, a node that silently stops. At a few thousand rows a month on two or three providers that is a few hours a quarter; at tens of thousands of rows across changing segments it is a job, and that job is what Clay sells.

How do you do the Clay job with Claude or ChatGPT?

With Tulina, Claude or ChatGPT runs the cascade above as an agent on your own connected providers: it reads a table, tries the providers you hold keys for in order, stops at the first hit, writes the value and its source back on each row, and reports what every step cost. A person still picks the providers, approves the plan, and decides what gets pushed where. Tulina is an agentic RevOps workflow builder, AI agents that run sales and GTM processes on a schedule or a webhook across the tools a team already uses, with every step and its cost visible; the waterfall is one of those processes.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT once your providers are connected (the email cascade can try Apollo, Hunter, AI Ark, Kaspr, Lusha, Forager, Dropcontact, lemlist and FullEnrich, and only the ones you hold a key for are called):

Enrich the contacts in my table "Q4 accounts" with a work email, and
a phone only where I ask for it, using my own providers first.

1. Read the rows whose status is empty. Each needs a LinkedIn URL, or
   a first name, last name and company domain. Mark a row with neither
   as "missing input" and leave it in the table; never drop it.
2. Before spending anything, show me the plan for one row: a dry run
   of the email waterfall, listing which providers would be tried, in
   what order, on whose key, and what each step costs. Wait for my go.
3. For each row, find the email with the email waterfall: try my
   connected providers in order and stop at the first hit, with at most
   two paid steps per row. Write the email, the provider that found it
   and the status (found, no match, pending) back on the row. Do not
   verify the email here; I will run verification as a separate step.
4. Only for rows I have marked "phone wanted", run the phone waterfall
   the same way, limited to the one provider I named, because phone
   credits cost more than email credits.
5. When a provider answers asynchronously, record its collect call on
   the row and come back to it later instead of paying the next step.
6. Return one table: name, best email with its source, phone where
   asked, and every row no provider resolved, flagged. Write nothing to
   my CRM or my outreach tool; pushing is a separate step I will ask
   for.
7. Report: rows read, found on the first provider, found on a later
   one, pending, no match, and what each step cost.

The process behind that prompt, with every step and the tools it uses:

Le processus dans Tulina

Enrichir des contacts par email et téléphone

Déclencheur · Événement

Liste créée

Un lot fraîchement assemblé ouvre l'exécution, si bien que l'enrichissement démarre sans que personne n'ait à le soumettre.

Claude exécute la suite en autonomie

1. 1

   Rassembler chaque contact identifiable

   Le lot contient chaque contact avec au moins un moyen de l'identifier : un email, un profil professionnel, ou un nom et une entreprise.

2. 2

   Enrichir tout le lot d'un coup

   Dropcontact

   Dropcontact

   Toute la liste part en une seule requête et les résultats sont récupérés dès qu'ils sont prêts, sans supposer un temps d'attente fixe.

3. 3

   Compléter les emails manquants

   Kaspr

   Kaspr

   Quiconque n'a toujours pas d'email utilisable reçoit un second passage, email uniquement, via un fournisseur de repli basé sur le profil.

4. 4

   Retourner un tableau, signaler chaque manque

   Un seul tableau propre revient, avec chaque vrai manque signalé plutôt qu'abandonné, et rien n'est écrit dans le CRM sauf demande séparée.

Voir le processus complet

The page shows one instance of the cascade, a batch pass on one provider and a second provider for the emails still missing. The prompt above generalises it: Tulina's email and phone waterfalls run that same first-hit logic across whichever providers your team holds keys for, your own keys first, and each step is billed by its provider exactly as a direct call would be. The waterfall itself adds no cost.

What we can say from running it, with the denominator. On 26 October 2026 we ran one email lookup as a dry run in our own workspace, default order. The plan listed nine providers. Four were planned, each with the key it would use and its cost named before anything was spent: lemlist on our own key, then AI Ark, Apollo and FullEnrich on shared keys. Five were skipped because no usable key was connected, one of them because that step only runs on the team's own key. Nothing was charged. That is the claim this page makes about cost visibility, and the only one: one lookup, one plan, every step priced in advance. It is not a found rate, which we did not measure here.

Pushing the clean table into a campaign is the next process, not this one: Outbound from buying signals scores, dedupes against the CRM, enriches and fills a paused Lemlist campaign with one opener per person, and Keep the CRM current is the write-back side on HubSpot or Folk.

Clay pricing vs Tulina

The two are priced on different things. Clay sells a bundle of platform actions and marketplace data credits; Tulina sells a plan with a monthly credit balance that is spent on providers, not on the platform, and your own provider keys are billed by the provider. Tulina does not publish plan prices on its site, so the column says so instead of inventing one.

One buyer's case, told without the name: a team that moved most of its Clay workflows to Tulina was paying Clay about $800 a month for them. That is one team, one stack and one set of workflows that had stopped changing. It says nothing about yours until you have done step 1 of the section above, which is why that step comes first.

What are the best alternatives to Clay?

The best alternative depends on which of Clay's jobs you are replacing; there is no single tool that is Clay without the price. Sorted by job:

The listicles ranking for "clay alternatives" are each written by one of the tools on them, and this page is written by one too. Read the job column before the name column.

Who are Clay's competitors?

Clay's competitors are mostly contact databases, not other orchestration tables. Read on 29 October 2026, the five listicles ranking for "clay competitors" that name their picks in the results page (Salesforce, ZoomInfo, Gumloop, Cognism, SyncGTM) put ZoomInfo and Cognism on four lists each, Apollo on three, Hunter and Saleshandy on two, and a long tail that appears once. Four of the five rank their own product first, and the fifth ranks it second. The same pages rank for "clay alternatives": six of the top ten results are shared between the two searches.

Sorted by the Clay job each one takes over, the field is the table in the previous section: a database with a sequencer (Apollo), orchestration on your own keys (n8n, Make, a script, an agent), a spreadsheet with AI columns (Bitscale, Freckle, Floqer and the others the listicles name), and enterprise data and intent (ZoomInfo, Cognism, Demandbase, 6sense). A database competes with Clay for the budget, not for the job: Clay can call most of them as providers.

Is Clay a competitor to Apollo? Partly, since Clay lists Apollo.io as a data provider and buys from it, while the two compete for where reps build lists and send from. Clay vs Apollo compares them head to head, with both pricing models and both waterfalls read at source; if Apollo is the tool you are leaving, Apollo alternatives sorts what replaces it by job. For what the Apollo connector can and cannot do from Claude or ChatGPT, see Apollo for Claude and ChatGPT.

What this comparison cannot tell you

• What Clay will cost you next month. Every figure here is dated 26 October 2026 and read from Clay's own pages; Clay changed its plans once this year and may again. The Enterprise price is not public.
• Whether the data is better anywhere. We measured no found rates on either side for this page. The one run quoted above was a dry run, which prices a plan and finds nothing.
• Tulina's plan price. It is quoted on a call, not published, so the table above cannot do the arithmetic Clay's table allows. Ask for the number before you compare totals.
• Whether an agent spends less than a table by itself. It does not. An agent with your keys will try every provider you let it; the cap per row on paid steps in the prompt above is there because the waterfall offers it, and you should set it.
• The breadth. Tulina's email cascade knows nine providers and this site lists 98 connectors; Clay's marketplace lists 150+. If the provider that wins in your market is not on the first list, that settles it.

For the enrichment process itself, with its steps and the two providers it names, see Enrich contacts with email and phone. For the other tools Clay is compared with on the same searches, Apollo and Lemlist each have a page on what the connector reads and writes.