Clay Pricing in 2026: Data Credits, Actions, and What a Real Month Costs

TL;DR: Clay pricing in 2026 has four tiers: Free ($0, 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month), Launch ($185 a month, or $167 billed annually, with 2,500 Data Credits and 15,000 Actions), Growth ($495, or $446 annually, with 6,000 Data Credits and 40,000 Actions) and Enterprise by quote. Every plan includes unlimited seats. The plan price is the floor, not the bill. A fully enriched contact costs 6 to 20 Data Credits at roughly $0.05 to $0.07 each, so a 5,000-row month on a standard email-plus-company recipe lands between $2,000 and $2,700 on Growth, before the person who builds the table. Below: the plan table, what each meter counts, what one contact costs, a cost-by-list-size table, a worked 5,000-row month, the costs that are not on the pricing page, and the one thing an enriched table still cannot tell you.

The number on clay.com/pricing is not the number on the invoice. Twice.

The first gap is small and deliberate. The pricing page shows "$167" next to Launch and "$446" next to Growth. Those are the annual-billing rates. Pay monthly and you pay $185 and $495. The second gap is the one people write angry reviews about. The plan buys a monthly allowance of two currencies, and a single afternoon with a waterfall column can spend a month of one of them.

If you have priced Clay.com, the GTM data platform, you already suspect this. Most Clay pricing guides stop at the plan table and a sentence about credits. This one gives you the arithmetic to predict your bill before you build a table: what a Data Credit and an Action each cost, what one enriched contact costs on three common recipes, what a month costs at 500, 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 rows, and where the hidden spend sits. We build a signal layer that reads a list after Clay has enriched it, so we have a view. It gets one section at the end.

How Much Does Clay Cost in 2026?

Clay costs $0 on the Free plan, $185 a month on Launch ($167 billed annually), $495 a month on Growth ($446 billed annually), and a custom annual contract on Enterprise. Every plan includes unlimited seats. The plan fee buys a monthly pool of Data Credits (enrichment lookups, from about $0.05 each) and Actions (platform steps, under $0.01 each). Spend past the pool and you buy more at a 30% premium.

Prices and allowances were read from Clay's pricing page on 21 October 2026. Clay's own page quotes "save 10%" on annual billing, which is where $167 and $446 come from.

Two things on that table matter more than they look.

The headline number is the annual rate. Clay's pricing page leads with $167 and $446. If you are comparing Clay against a vendor that leads with its monthly price, you will undercount Clay by about 10% until the first invoice arrives. Nothing is hidden, but the default framing favours Clay.

Seats are free. Usage is not. Clay is one of the few tools in the sales intelligence category that charges per account rather than per user. A 15-rep team pays the same plan fee as a founder. That is a real advantage against Apollo's per-seat model, and we priced the crossover in Clay vs Apollo. It also means the only variable on the bill is how much data you pull, which is the part most buyers do not model.

How Clay Pricing Works: Two Meters Under Every Table

Clay replaced its old single-credit model on 11 March 2026. The three legacy self-serve plans (Starter $149, Explorer $349, Pro $800) were retired, and usage was split into two meters. Cleanlist's write-up of the change is the most complete independent record of what moved. Here is what each meter counts.

Data Credits: the meter that decides the bill

A Data Credit is spent whenever Clay buys a piece of data from one of its 150+ marketplace providers. Finding a work email, pulling a mobile number, enriching a company's headcount and funding, scraping a LinkedIn profile. Each provider sets its own price in credits, and the price of the same field varies by provider.

Clay says Data Credits start at "$0.05 each" and get cheaper as you buy more. Valley's explainer puts the slider at roughly $0.043 a credit by 50,000 credits a month. On the base plans the effective rate is a little higher, because part of the plan fee is paying for Actions. Divide the plan fee by its credits and Launch comes out at $0.074 a Data Credit on monthly billing ($0.067 annual). Growth comes out at $0.083 ($0.074 annual).

Read that again. Growth is not cheaper per Data Credit than Launch. You upgrade to Growth for 25,000 more Actions, unlimited rows, CRM sync and the API, not for cheaper data. If your only problem is running out of Data Credits, the slider and the top-up rate matter more than the tier.

Actions: the meter that runs quietly

An Action is spent every time a row does something inside Clay that does not buy external data. A formula column, an AI prompt in Claygent using Clay's own models, a filter, a write to a CRM, a sent email through the Sequencer. Clay prices them at "less than $0.01 each," and in practice they are a rounding error on most tables.

They stop being a rounding error when a table has many columns, which is the part of Clay pricing that surprises teams on Launch. A five-step table on 5,000 rows is 25,000 Actions. That is over Launch's 15,000 allowance before a single Data Credit is spent. Actions are the reason small teams get pushed from Launch to Growth even when their data spend is modest.

The five rules that change the arithmetic

Clay's pricing page states these, and most pricing guides skip them.

1. Unused Data Credits roll over, capped at 2x your monthly allowance. Launch can bank up to 5,000, Growth up to 12,000. Actions do not roll over.
2. Failed lookups are not charged Data Credits. Clay's FAQ says Actions are not charged either. Some independent guides report the Action still runs. Check your usage dashboard after a test batch rather than assuming.
3. Bring your own API key and you pay only Actions. If you already have an Apollo or Prospeo subscription, plug the key in and Clay's data meter stops running for that column.
4. Top-up credits cost 30% more than your plan's rate on Launch and Growth. Legacy plans paid a 50% premium, which is the figure still circulating in older guides.
5. Legacy plan holders kept their plan only if they made no changes after 10 April 2026. Change tiers and you move onto the new meters.

What One Enriched Contact Costs on Clay

Clay does not publish a per-contact price, because there is no single recipe. Three are common, and three independent sources have measured their credit cost: Cleanlist (6 to 20 credits for a full record), DevCommX (email 2 to 3, waterfall 4 to 8, phone 8 to 15, firmographics 5 to 10) and Amplemarket (email finder 2 to 5, phone 5 to 10, waterfall 10 to 25). The table below uses the midpoints and the Launch monthly rate of $0.074 a credit.

Three notes on reading it.

The Light recipe is where Clay is cheap. A profile and one email at 15 cents is competitive with any data enrichment tool on the market, and the Free plan's 100 credits cover about 50 of them a month.

The Full recipe is where Clay stops being cheap. Mobile numbers are priced by premium providers, and the waterfall keeps calling providers until one returns a hit. Dollar-thirty-three a contact for 5,000 contacts is $6,650 in data alone. At that recipe, a pay-on-success waterfall like FullEnrich or BetterContact at $0.10 to $0.55 a result is often the better buy, which is why they appear in our Clay alternatives roundup.

The Standard recipe is the one most outbound teams actually run, and 59 cents a row is the number to carry into the list-size table.

Not sure which recipe your list needs? Most teams enrich every row to the same depth and then contact 5% of them. Run a free signal check on the list first and enrich the rows that show a buying signal. It is usually a tenth of the file.

Clay Pricing by List Size: 500 to 5,000 Rows a Month

This is the table no competing Clay pricing guide builds. Credits and Actions are the recipe midpoints above multiplied by rows. The plan column is the cheapest tier whose base allowance covers both meters without a top-up, or the lowest tier plus the top-up it would need. Top-up credits are priced at $0.065 (the $0.05 entry rate plus the 30% premium).

The pattern is the whole argument of this page. Launch covers a Light recipe up to about 1,200 rows a month, or a Standard recipe up to about 300. Growth covers a Standard recipe up to 750 rows before top-ups start. Everything else on the table is a plan fee plus a data bill that is larger than the plan fee.

Two caveats. The Clay slider sells higher credit allowances inside a tier at a lower per-credit rate than the top-up price, so a team that knows its volume in advance can beat the estimates above by 20% to 30%. And Clay's rollover cap means a team that enriches in bursts can bank two months of credits and run one 5,000-row campaign a quarter on Launch. The table prices a steady monthly volume, which is how most teams actually bill.

What a 5,000-Row Month Actually Costs

Take the row most teams ask about: 5,000 contacts, Standard recipe, steady monthly volume. Here is the full month with both meters counted.

Data Credits. 5,000 rows at roughly 8 credits each is 40,000 credits. Growth includes 6,000. The remaining 34,000 cost $0.065 each at the top-up rate, or $2,210. Buy the allowance in advance through the slider at roughly $0.045 to $0.05 and the same 34,000 credits cost $1,530 to $1,700.

Actions. 5,000 rows through a five-column table is 25,000 Actions. Growth's 40,000 covers it. Add a Sequencer send and a CRM write per row and you are at 35,000. Still covered, with no margin for a re-run.

Plan fee. $446 on annual billing, $495 monthly.

The month. Between $2,000 (annual billing, slider pricing) and $2,705 (monthly billing, top-up pricing). Call it $2,400 for a steady 5,000-row Standard month, or 48 cents a row all-in. Clay's own pricing page leads with "$446."

Dana runs RevOps at a 12-rep SaaS company in Denver. In June she signed Clay Launch to re-enrich a 3,000-row account list before a Q3 relaunch. She built the table on Friday, set a three-provider email waterfall plus a company column, and ran it. The 2,500 Data Credits were gone before lunch, 1,900 rows in. The remaining 1,100 rows cost a $95 top-up and a Monday-morning conversation about why the "$167 tool" had billed $280 in its first week. The table worked. The plan was never going to.

The Costs That Are Not on Clay's Pricing Page

Four costs sit outside the Clay pricing table, and three of them are larger than the plan.

The person who builds the table

Clay is a spreadsheet-shaped workflow engine. Someone has to design the waterfall, write the Claygent prompts, set the filters and keep the table alive when a provider changes its output. On most teams that person is a RevOps lead or a GTM engineer, a role with a median salary of $127,500. For a 30-rep revenue org that is a rounding error. For a founder or a five-rep team, the tool costs $185 a month and the person to run it costs ten times that. We ran the full math on the GTM engineer question separately.

Learning on live credits

There is no sandbox. Every test run of a table spends real Data Credits at the real rate. In Bloomberry's survey of 500 GTM professionals, 42% of Clay complaints were about credit consumption and 28% about the learning curve, with two to four weeks quoted to reach basic proficiency and several people reporting $500 or more spent before a working table existed.

Tomas is a solo founder selling a dev-tools product in Lisbon. He signed Launch in April, imported 800 LinkedIn URLs and spent three evenings learning Clay by running columns against the full list each time he changed a prompt. By the time his first email went out he had spent $380 in credits, more than two months of plan fee, on versions of a table he deleted. His advice now: build on a 20-row sample and only expand when the output is right.

The CRM gate

CRM sync, the HTTP API and webhooks are Growth features. A team that needs enriched rows to land in HubSpot automatically pays $495 a month minimum, not $185, regardless of how little data it pulls. For a two-rep team on a Light recipe, that gate alone nearly triples the bill.

The top-up premium

A 30% premium over your plan rate on every credit past the allowance. It is not predatory, and it is lower than the 50% legacy plans paid, but it compounds. A team that overruns by 2,000 credits every month pays about $1,560 a year in premium alone, which is most of a Growth upgrade.

Already paying a Clay bill you did not predict? Export last month's enriched table and run a free signal check on it. If fewer than 10% of the rows show a buying signal, you are paying to enrich contacts you were never going to reach this quarter.

Which Clay Plan Should You Pick?

Start from the job, not the tier. Clay pricing rewards teams that know their monthly row count and recipe before they sign.

One more rule. If your enrichment volume is lumpy, a quarterly campaign rather than a monthly drip, the rollover cap makes Launch stretch further than the table above suggests. Bank credits for two months, run the campaign in the third.

When Clay Is Worth the Price

It is, for a specific kind of team.

Clay reached a $7.1 billion valuation in September 2026 on a $115 million Series D, claims 500,000 GTM teams and holds a 4.9 on G2. That does not happen to a tool that only burns credits. Three situations justify the bill.

You have a builder and your own list sources. If a RevOps lead already owns the table and your lists come from your product, your CRM or your events rather than a vendor database, Clay's 150-provider waterfall will hit a 75% to 90% email match rate that no single B2B data provider matches on its own. The per-row cost is justified by rows you could not have enriched elsewhere.

You are past six seats and comparing against per-seat tools. At six Apollo Professional seats you are paying $474 a month before credits. Growth at $446 covers unlimited seats. Clay's pricing unit wins past that line, and keeps winning as the team grows.

You need orchestration, not just data. Claygent research, conditional logic, multi-destination writes and now a native Sequencer. If the job is "take this list, research every row against five questions, route the results," Clay is the cheapest way to do it that does not involve writing code.

If none of those three describe you, the honest read of the Clay pricing tables above is that you are buying a workflow engine to do a data job, and the data job has cheaper tools.

What a Perfectly Enriched Table Still Cannot Tell You

Here is the thing about the 5,000-row month. At the end of it you have 5,000 verified emails, 5,000 company records and a $2,400 bill. You still do not know which 250 of those people are in a buying cycle this quarter.

Priya runs a five-rep team at a Series A fintech. Her Growth table produced a 94% deliverable list in August. The sequence that followed got a 0.7% reply rate. The enrichment was fine. The targeting was the problem: 95% of any B2B market is not buying at any given moment, which is the 95-5 rule in practice, and no column in a Clay table tells you which 5% you are looking at.

That is the layer we build. Getcleed reads what each person on a list has actually done on LinkedIn in the last 30 days (posts, comments, reactions, job changes, what their company announced), scores each one 0 to 100 for buying intent, and writes the hook for the ones worth contacting. It runs on a CSV, a Sales Navigator list or a HubSpot export, including one that came out of Clay.

The pricing contrast is deliberate. Getcleed is $129 a month, or $99 billed annually, flat, for 1,000 leads analyzed. No seat multiplier, no credit meter, no top-up premium, no builder. Clay has field signals of its own (job change on Launch, web intent on Growth) and we compared them to activity signals in Getcleed vs Clay. The short version: Clay tells you a field changed. Getcleed tells you a person is paying attention.

The practical sequence is cheaper than it sounds. Score the raw list first. Enrich only the rows above 70. Priya's 5,000-row month becomes a 400-row month, about $235 in Clay data on the Standard recipe plus $99 for the scoring, and the sequence goes to people who posted about the problem last week.

Have a list sitting in a Clay table right now? Run a free signal check on it. Seven-day trial, no credit card, and you will know before the next Clay invoice which rows deserved the credits.

Clay Pricing FAQ

What is the difference between a Data Credit and an Action on Clay?

A Data Credit is spent when Clay buys data from an external provider: an email, a phone number, company firmographics. An Action is spent on every internal step a row takes: a formula, an AI prompt, a filter, a CRM write, a sent email. Data Credits cost about $0.05 and up. Actions cost under a cent.

Does Clay charge per seat?

No. Every Clay plan includes unlimited seats. You pay a plan fee per account plus usage. This is the main pricing advantage Clay holds over per-seat tools like Apollo and Lusha.

Is Clay's $167 price monthly or annual?

Annual. The $167 (Launch) and $446 (Growth) figures on clay.com/pricing are the per-month rates when you commit to a year. Month-to-month billing is $185 and $495.

How many contacts can I enrich on Clay Launch?

On a Light recipe (profile plus one work email, about 2 credits a row), roughly 1,200 contacts a month from the 2,500-credit allowance. On a Standard recipe with an email waterfall and company data (about 8 credits), roughly 300. Rollover lets you bank up to 5,000 credits for a larger burst.

What happens when I run out of Clay credits?

Tables pause on the columns that need Data Credits. You can buy a top-up at a 30% premium over your plan's rate, buy a larger allowance through the slider at a lower rate, or upgrade tiers. Failed lookups are not charged Data Credits, so a bad provider match does not drain the pool.

Did Clay pricing go up in 2026?

It was restructured on 11 March 2026. Starter ($149), Explorer ($349) and Pro ($800) were replaced by Launch ($185) and Growth ($495), and a single credit became two meters. Clay says marketplace data costs fell about 50% on average. Some legacy users report their effective mid-tier cost rose because credit allowances changed. Legacy plans stayed in place for customers who made no changes after 10 April 2026.

The Short Version

Clay pricing in 2026 is a $185 or $495 plan fee plus a data bill that scales with how deep you enrich and how many rows you run. Five things to carry into the decision:

• The headline price on clay.com is the annual rate. Monthly is 10% higher.
• A Light recipe costs about 15 cents a row, a Standard about 59 cents, a Full about $1.33.
• Launch covers about 1,200 Light rows or 300 Standard rows a month. Growth is not cheaper per credit; it buys Actions, CRM sync and the API.
• A steady 5,000-row Standard month runs $2,000 to $2,700 before anyone's salary.
• No amount of enrichment tells you which rows are in-market. Score first, enrich the top 10%, and the Clay bill drops with it.

If you are about to sign, build your table on a 20-row sample and price it against the list-size table above. If you already have the list, run a free signal check on it and find out which rows were worth the credits before you buy any more.