Clay Pricing 2026: Plans, Actions and Data Credits Explained

Clay's self-serve plans start at $185 a month, but the median company buying Clay pays $59,993 a year, according to Vendr's data on 95 purchases. The gap comes from how Clay charges. Since March 2026, every Clay plan runs on two separate meters, Actions and Data Credits, and both grow with the size and complexity of your workflows.

This guide explains Clay's current plans, how Actions and Data Credits work, what changed in the March 2026 pricing overhaul, how Clay charges for AI and what teams actually end up paying. All plan details come from Clay's pricing page, checked in October 2026.

Clay pricing at a glance (2026)

Clay sells four plans. Every plan includes unlimited seats, so you pay for usage rather than headcount:

Yearly billing saves about 10%. The headline price is a starting point: each plan has sliders for Actions and Data Credits, and moving either one up raises your monthly price.

What changed in Clay's pricing in March 2026

On March 11, 2026, Clay rebuilt its pricing from the ground up. Before the change, a single type of credit paid for both data and platform work, across Starter ($149), Explorer ($349) and Pro ($800) plans. The main changes were:

• Credits split in two. Data Credits now pay for data, and Actions pay for platform work.
• Data got cheaper. Clay cut marketplace data costs by 50 to 90% on most providers, and says the most-used enrichments now cost 50% fewer credits on average.
• Three paid self-serve plans became two. Launch and Growth replaced Starter, Explorer and Pro, with CRM sync and HTTP API access now on Growth at $495 instead of the old $800 Pro plan.
• Failed lookups are free. If an enrichment returns no result, you aren't charged Data Credits or Actions.
• Legacy plans were grandfathered. Existing customers can keep their old pricing, but the window to switch between legacy tiers closed in April 2026.

Clay modeled the new structure on usage-based infrastructure pricing, with a platform charge and a commodity charge, and expected a short-term revenue dip of about 10% from cheaper data. For most buyers, the practical effect is that data is cheaper, but the work you do on the platform now has its own meter.

Actions vs. Data Credits, explained

Understanding these two meters is the key to predicting your Clay bill.

Data Credits pay for data you buy through Clay's marketplace of 150+ data partners: emails, phone numbers and company details. They start at $0.05 each and get cheaper at higher volumes.

Actions measure platform work: enriching a row, running a table, calling an AI model, sending data to another tool or exporting it out of Clay. They start at less than $0.01 each.

Three rules matter most in practice:

1. Actions reset every billing cycle. Unused Actions are lost, so your Action tier should match your typical month, not your busiest one.
2. Data Credits roll over, with a cap. On Launch and Growth, unused credits can build up to twice your monthly amount. Enterprise customers can roll over up to 15% of the previous year's credits if they renew at the same or a higher commitment.
3. Your own API keys skip Data Credits, not Actions. If you connect your own data provider or AI keys, each run still uses one Action. Teams that used Clay mainly as a free workflow layer on top of their own keys now pay for that work.

Clay says its Launch and Growth plans are sized so that 90% of customers never hit a usage limit, and you can top up Data Credits without moving to a higher plan.

Data Credits matter most in waterfalls, where Clay can query 150+ data providers in sequence for the same field.

How Clay charges for AI

AI research through Claygent and AI columns is one of Clay's most popular features, and it has its own pricing logic:

• Fixed-price models. About 80% of models, including all of Clay's native models, cost a flat number of Data Credits per task. These suit classification, short summaries and simple lookups.
• Variable-price models. Token-heavy frontier models, such as GPT-5.1 and Claude 4.6 Sonnet, are charged by actual token use, with no markup. Clay shows an estimate before the run, and says 75% of runs cost less than the estimate.

The takeaway: simple AI tasks are predictable, while deep, multi-step research prompts can vary widely in cost from one row to the next.

What Clay really costs as you scale

Clay's prices scale with usage, so it helps to see how the sliders move. Here are the monthly-billing prices for higher tiers, taken from Clay's pricing page. Clay also offers a pricing calculator for modeling your own usage:

A team on Growth that needs 20,000 Data Credits and 100,000 Actions a month would pay $880 plus $450, or $1,330 a month on monthly billing, before any variable AI costs. At the high end, Vendr's purchase data shows Clay contracts ranging from $16,440 to $173,200 a year, with a median of $59,993, which reflects the larger, custom deals many growing teams end up signing.

What a typical team pays: three examples

Using the monthly prices from Clay's sliders, here's what three common setups cost before variable AI usage:

• A founder testing outbound: the Free plan covers learning and small tests. Once you need phone numbers or more than 200 rows, Launch at $185 a month ($167 on yearly billing) is the realistic entry point.
• A small outbound team enriching a few thousand contacts a month: Launch with 15,000 Actions ($60) and 6,000 Data Credits ($290) comes to $350 a month. Data credits, not the plan, drive the bill at this stage.
• A RevOps team syncing Clay with its CRM: CRM auto-sync requires Growth. With 100,000 Actions ($450) and 20,000 Data Credits ($880), the bill is $1,330 a month, or about $16,000 a year before AI usage.

That last figure lands right at the low end of Vendr's range for Clay contracts, which shows how quickly a team moves from a self-serve plan into a five-figure annual commitment once Clay becomes core infrastructure.

The hidden costs of Clay

Clay's pricing page is transparent, but a few costs don't show up in the plan price:

• The people who run it. Clay rewards teams that design, test and maintain workflows. Many companies hire or train a dedicated GTM engineer, and that salary is usually the largest Clay-related cost.
• Feature gates. CRM auto-sync, HTTP APIs and webhooks need Growth, and the Free plan stops at 200 rows per table, while Launch allows up to 50,000.
• Expiring Actions. Overbuying Actions wastes money, because they don't roll over.
• Variable AI costs. Heavy research prompts on frontier models can make monthly spend hard to forecast.
• Iteration. Every time you rerun a table to fix a workflow, you use Actions again.

How to lower your Clay bill

If Clay is the right tool for you, these habits keep the cost under control:

• Filter before you enrich. Remove off-target companies and duplicates first, so you don't pay to enrich rows you'll never use.
• Order waterfalls by cost and hit rate. Put cheaper, high-coverage providers first.
• Use fixed-price AI models for simple tasks and save frontier models for genuinely complex research.
• Bring your own keys for data providers you already pay for, so you only use Actions.
• Size Actions for a normal month and top up Data Credits when needed, since only Data Credits roll over.
• Choose yearly billing once your usage is stable to save about 10%.

If you mainly use Clay for contact enrichment, a dedicated waterfall tool can be cheaper: FullEnrich starts at about $55 a month for 1,000 credits and only charges for data it finds.

Is Clay worth the price?

Clay is worth it for teams that treat data as a system: they want custom logic, many data sources, AI research and automated pushes into their CRM, and they have someone who owns the workflows. For those teams, the pricing overhaul made data cheaper and the plans clearer.

It's harder to justify if what you need is simply a steady supply of accurate leads. In that case, you're paying for a workbench, plus the time to build on it, when you mainly want the finished product. Our list of the best Clay alternatives compares eight tools for that situation.

For simpler needs, Apollo's published plans start at $49 per user a month on yearly billing, with data, sequences and a dialer included.

Clay vs. Spona: two different pricing models

Spona solves the same core problem, getting accurate, enriched leads, with a different model. Instead of paying for platform Actions and Data Credits and building workflows, you describe your ideal customer in a chat, and Spona's AI mines 40+ data sources, verifies each lead and delivers a scored list in minutes.

The pricing difference follows from that:

• You see the price before you buy. Every search starts with free sample leads, a per-lead price and an estimate of your market size.
• No platform meter. There are no Actions to size, no rows to rerun and no workflows to maintain, so your cost tracks the leads you take.
• No GTM engineering required. A rep can get a usable list from a chat in about four minutes, which removes the biggest hidden cost of Clay.
• Flexible data. Spona covers B2B contacts as well as local businesses, Shopify stores and venture-backed companies, with CRM enrichment that skips records you already have.

Clay remains the better choice when you want to build and own complex, custom data pipelines. When you want verified leads without the build, Spona is the faster and more predictable option. See Spona's pricing to compare.

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FAQ

How much does Clay cost?

Clay has a free plan, Launch from $185 a month ($167 on yearly billing), Growth from $495 a month ($446 yearly) and custom Enterprise pricing. Vendr's data puts the median Clay contract at $59,993 a year.

Is Clay free?

Yes. The free plan includes 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month, unlimited seats and tables, waterfalls and Claygent, with a limit of 200 rows per table.

What are Actions in Clay?

Actions measure platform work, such as running a table, enriching a row, calling an AI model or exporting data. They cost less than a cent each and reset every billing cycle.

Do Clay credits roll over?

Data Credits roll over up to twice your monthly amount on Launch and Growth. Actions don't roll over.

Why did Clay change its pricing?

Clay split its credits in March 2026 to separate the cost of data from the cost of using the platform. Data became 50 to 90% cheaper on most providers, while platform work now has its own meter.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Clay?

It depends on what you need. Persana and BetterContact are cheaper for enrichment, while Spona lets you pay per verified lead without building workflows. See our Clay alternatives guide for the full comparison.

What is Clay's new pricing model?

Clay's new model, which it calls Pricing 3.0, splits usage into Data Credits for data bought from its marketplace and Actions for the work the platform does, such as running tables, calling AI models and exporting data. It launched on March 11, 2026.

Sources

• Vendr: Clay purchase data
• Clay: pricing page
• Salesforge: Clay's March 2026 pricing changes
• PricingSaaS: the backstory behind Clay's new pricing
• Clay: waterfall enrichment
• Clay: pricing calculator
• FullEnrich: pricing page
• Apollo.io: pricing page
• Clay: introducing Pricing 3.0