Clay pricing in 2026 starts at $185 a month for Launch and $495 a month for Growth billed monthly, or $167 and $446 a month billed yearly, checked on Clay's pricing page on 19 October 2026. Each plan price is two allowances added together: Actions, which pay for the work Clay does on a row, and Data Credits, which pay for the data it buys. Data Credits are the part that sets the real bill. At the volume of one live cold email program, 2,000 new contacts a month, Clay comes to about $1,085 a month on monthly billing.
Key Findings
- List prices: Launch is $185 a month and Growth $495 billed monthly, or $167 and $446 a month billed yearly. Free gives 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions.
- The price is two parts: Launch's $185 is $60 of Actions plus $125 of Data Credits, so the included credits cost exactly $0.05 each. You can raise either part without changing plan.
- Credits run out first: Clay puts a fully enriched contact at 6 to 20 Data Credits, so Launch's 2,500 credits cover roughly 125 to 415 contacts a month.
- Lookups that find nothing are free: Clay charges no Actions and no Data Credits when an enrichment returns no result, so an email waterfall costs only the provider that hits.
- Reachly's worked example: costed step by step, its Clay workflow uses about 3 Actions per contact. At 2,000 contacts a month the Action allowance is barely touched, and the bill is about $1,085 a month at 6 to 10 credits per contact, or $2,330 at 20.
- Clay is one line of the stack: Thibault Garcia, Reachly's founder, counts more than 15 tools behind a Clay-based outbound program, plus the person who builds the tables.
- Top-ups cost 30% more than tier credits. If you top up every month, the next credit tier is the cheaper move. See how Reachly runs Clay inside its outbound lead generation service.
What are Clay's pricing plans in 2026?
Clay sells three self-serve plans plus Enterprise. Free is for testing, Launch is the real entry point, and Growth adds CRM sync, HTTP API calls and web intent signals on top of bigger allowances.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Data Credits a month | Actions a month | Rows per table |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 100 | 500 | 200 |
| Launch | $185 | $167 a month | 2,500 (up to 10,000) | 15,000 | 50,000 |
| Growth | $495 | $446 a month | 6,000 (up to 100,000) | 40,000 | 50,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Launch is the first plan that can find phone numbers, track job changes and send through Clay's sequencer or an outside one. Clay's own guidance puts Launch at under 1,000 enriched records a month and Growth at 1,000 to 10,000 (Clay plans and billing).
How the plan price splits
Clay's pricing page now shows each plan as an Action tier plus a Data Credit tier, and you can move either one up on its own. That split is the most useful number on the page, because it tells you what a Data Credit really costs inside your plan.
| Plan and billing | Actions part | Data Credits part | Total | Price per included credit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch, monthly | $60 for 15,000 | $125 for 2,500 | $185 | $0.050 |
| Launch, yearly | $54 a month | $113 a month | $167 | $0.045 |
| Growth, monthly | $205 for 40,000 | $290 for 6,000 | $495 | $0.048 |
| Growth, yearly | $185 a month | $261 a month | $446 | $0.044 |
Bigger credit tiers get slightly cheaper per credit: 10,000 credits a month cost $460, 20,000 cost $880 and 50,000 cost $2,125 on monthly billing, which is $0.046 down to $0.043 a credit. To price your own mix, Clay has an official pricing calculator, and a 14-day trial you can start on Clay’s site.
What do Clay's pricing terms mean?
Clay's pricing uses a handful of its own words. Here is what each one means in plain English.
- Row: one contact or company in a Clay table, like one line in a spreadsheet.
- Enrichment: filling in missing details on a row, such as a work email, phone number or job title.
- Actions: Clay's count of work done. Each enrichment, AI run, CRM sync or export uses 1 Action per row.
- Data Credits: what Clay charges when a step buys data from one of its 150+ providers. Clay lists 0.5 to 10+ credits per enrichment, with emails cheap and phone numbers expensive.
- Waterfall: asking several data providers in order until one finds the answer. Providers that come back empty cost nothing.
- Top-up: extra Data Credits bought mid-cycle. They cost 30% more than tier credits.
- Rollover: unused Data Credits carrying into the next cycle. Actions never roll over.
- Your own API key: connecting your own paid account with a data or AI provider, so that provider bills you directly. Clay then charges the Action but no Data Credits.
How does Clay pricing work since March 2026?
Clay changed the model on March 11, 2026. Before that, buyers mostly thought in one credit bucket. Now every step is counted twice: once as an Action for the work, and once in Data Credits for any data bought.
That change is good for some workflows and bad for others. Workflows that mostly move, score and export data got cheaper. Workflows that buy phone numbers or run heavy AI research on every row climb past the plan price quickly. If that is your workflow, our Clay alternatives post prices the same job on five other tools.
| Rule | What it means for your bill | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Actions and Data Credits are counted separately | Two allowances to watch, and either can run out | Clay pricing page |
| 1 Action per enrichment, AI run or exported record | Searching, importing, formulas and filters use no Actions | Clay University |
| No result, no charge | Empty lookups cost no Actions and no Data Credits | Clay pricing page |
| A fully enriched contact uses 6 to 20 Data Credits | Email-only rows sit low, rows with phone numbers sit high | Clay University |
| 80% of AI models cost a fixed number of credits | Token-heavy models such as GPT-5.1 bill by tokens used, shown with a ~ estimate | Clay pricing page |
| Own API key skips Data Credits | The Action still counts | Clay pricing page |
| Top-ups cost 30% extra (50% on legacy plans) | Capped at $1,000 per top-up and $5,000 in any 7 days | Clay University |
Sources: Clay’s pricing page, Clay University on Actions and Data Credits and plans and billing, and Clay’s pricing memo from 11 March 2026.
If your team compares Clay plans on the monthly fee alone, you are pricing the product the way it worked before March. Price it per row instead.
How many contacts do Clay credits actually cover?
Reachly is a Clay Solutions Partner, and we build client workflows in Clay for outbound list building. The number we price every workflow on is how many usable contacts a plan produces before the credits run out.
Clay's help center says a fully filled-in contact typically uses 6 to 20 Data Credits, including the company and person profile, email, phone number and any AI enrichments (Clay University). So a list where you only need work emails sits near the low end, and a list where you also want mobile numbers sits near the high end.
| Plan | Data Credits a month | At 6 credits | At 10 credits | At 20 credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | 16 | 10 | 5 |
| Launch | 2,500 | 416 | 250 | 125 |
| Growth | 6,000 | 1,000 | 600 | 300 |
| Plan and billing | At 6 credits | At 10 credits | At 20 credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch, yearly ($167) | $0.40 | $0.67 | $1.34 |
| Launch, monthly ($185) | $0.44 | $0.74 | $1.48 |
| Growth, yearly ($446) | $0.45 | $0.74 | $1.49 |
| Growth, monthly ($495) | $0.50 | $0.83 | $1.65 |
What the coverage numbers tell you
Data Credits run out long before Actions. Launch's 15,000 Actions would only run short if every contact went through more than 36 steps, which is why Data Credits are the limit on normal workflows that fill in a lot of data.
Growth buys more contacts a month at about the same cost per contact. Its extra Actions and features are what the higher price pays for.
On Clay's own numbers, Launch covers roughly 125 to 415 fully filled-in contacts a month, depending on how much of each contact you fill in and whether you add phone numbers. That is the point where most teams start asking why Clay feels expensive.
What does Clay cost for a real outbound program?
The coverage tables use Clay's averages. To see what a working program costs, we counted the Actions in the Clay workflow Reachly runs for client campaigns, step by step, against Clay's billing rules, then priced the result at a real sending volume.
The workflow, with the Actions each step uses
Accounts come into Clay first, from sources such as AI Ark, LinkedIn and Google Maps scrapes. An AI agent checks every account against the segment rules, formulas throw out what does not fit, and only then do the paid steps run: finding the person, a waterfall of six or seven email providers, a second verification pass, and the export to Smartlead for email or HeyReach for LinkedIn when no valid email exists. The verification step is there because many databases sell catch-all addresses as valid.
Two things come out of counting it this way. Filtering is free, so every account dropped before the email waterfall saves real money. And with empty lookups free, a long waterfall raises your hit rate without raising your Action count.
The worked example: 2,000 contacts a month
Take a cold email program sending 4,000 emails a month. Reachly sequences are two emails, so that is 2,000 new contacts a month. Say the AI checks 4,000 accounts to find them. That is about 10,000 Actions a month, which fits inside either plan. Clay's own guidance puts 2,000 records a month in Growth, so the example uses Growth's 40,000 Actions and buys the Data Credit tier that covers the month.
| Credits per contact | Credits needed | Credit tier bought | Monthly bill | Per contact | Per email sent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 12,000 | 20,000 ($880) | $1,085 | $0.54 | $0.27 |
| 10 | 20,000 | 20,000 ($880) | $1,085 | $0.54 | $0.27 |
| 20 | 40,000 | 50,000 ($2,125) | $2,330 | $1.17 | $0.58 |
Monthly bill = $205 for Growth's 40,000 Actions plus the credit tier. On yearly billing the same three rows come to about $977, $977 and $2,098 a month. Phone numbers are the swing factor: the 20-credit row is what happens when every contact gets a mobile lookup.
When to top up and when to buy the next tier
At 6 credits a contact, the month needs 12,000 credits. Buying the 10,000 tier ($460) and topping up the last 2,000 at the 30% premium costs about $120 more at the tier's rate, which brings the month to roughly $785 against $1,085 for the 20,000 tier. A top-up is the cheaper fix for a one-off spike. If you top up every month, buy the bigger tier, because Clay caps how much you can top up and the premium never goes away.
Why is Clay so expensive?
Clay feels expensive for two reasons. The plan price hides the per-row cost until you run a real list, and Clay is only one of many tools a Clay-based outbound program pays for.
In Reachly's workflow above, Clay sits between a data source, six or seven email finders, a verification tool, a sending platform, a LinkedIn tool and the domains and mailboxes that send the email. Each of those is its own subscription. Budget Clay as one line of that stack. Reachly's guide to GTM engineering breaks the full stack down by layer.
The cost nobody puts on the pricing page
Someone has to build and maintain the tables. When Thibault describes the first outbound hire for a B2B startup, he asks for “someone that is able to orchestrate clay tables and complex workflows, as well as write very good copy.” That person costs more than any Clay plan, which is why many teams weigh hiring one against bringing in a GTM engineer from outside.
Is Clay still worth paying for?
For orchestration, yes: Clay is where Reachly's segmentation, AI checks and waterfalls run. For the raw data itself, Thibault's own ranking has moved.
That is the practical way to keep a Clay bill down: source accounts from a tool with good filters, bring them into Clay, and spend Data Credits only on the rows that survive qualification. If you are weighing a bundled database and sequencer instead, we compare the two models in Clay vs Apollo.
When do top-ups and rollover change the math?
Rollover helps if your usage is lumpy. On monthly billing, unused Data Credits build up until your balance reaches 2x your monthly allowance. On yearly billing you carry forward up to 15% of the year's credits, and only if you renew on the same or a higher plan. That matters for campaign builds, market mapping and one-off list projects.
Top-ups are a different story. One-time and automatic top-ups both carry the 30% premium, together they can add at most 4x your monthly credits, and each top-up is capped at $1,000. On a workflow where Data Credits already run out before Actions, the premium lands on the allowance you run out of first.
- Low-burn workflow: top-ups are rare and cheap enough to ignore
- Phone-heavy workflow: top-ups show up in the first month
- AI-heavy workflow: token-billed models make credit use harder to predict, so watch the ~ estimates
- Bring-your-own-key workflow: Data Credits drop, and Actions become the allowance to watch
A disciplined table that enriches only qualified rows stays efficient for a long time. A loose table that runs five or six enrichments on every imported contact eats credits whether those rows are good or not.
Which Clay plan makes sense for your workflow?
The right plan depends less on company size and more on how many rows you enrich a month and how much each row costs.
| Plan | Buy it if | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Free | You are learning the tool or testing one enrichment path | 200 rows per table and no phone numbers |
| Launch | One focused workflow under about 400 fully enriched contacts a month | Phone lookups drain 2,500 credits in about 125 contacts |
| Growth | 1,000+ contacts a month, CRM sync, or several workflows at once | Paying for 40,000 Actions you may never use |
| Enterprise | 10,000+ records a month, SSO or user groups with credit budgets | Annual commitment and sales-led pricing |
Clay's model rewards selectivity. If you score or filter rows before expensive enrichments, the platform stays cheap. If you import a huge list and enrich everything immediately, the price per usable record climbs fast.
What should you calculate before you buy Clay?
You need five inputs. Start with the workflow you will actually run, count every column that fires, then do the math in this order.
| Input | How to get it | Worked example |
|---|---|---|
| Rows per month | Emails a month divided by emails per sequence | 4,000 / 2 = 2,000 |
| Actions per row | 1 per enrichment, AI run and export that fires | About 3, plus 1 per account checked |
| Data Credits per row | Add the paid lookups in the order they fire | 6 to 20 |
| Qualified-row rate | Share of imported rows that deserve paid steps | 2,000 kept from 4,000 accounts |
| Overflow months | Whether rollover covers spikes or top-ups are likely | Tier up if topping up monthly |
The mistake pattern we see most: a buyer sees $167, assumes it covers a decent amount of prospecting, and finds it covers about 125 contacts once phone numbers are included. For where Clay fits in the wider process, Reachly's guide to sales prospecting techniques puts enrichment at step two of four, after research and list building.
If you want one rule of thumb, work out Clay's cost per contact you actually email, and ignore the per-user and monthly numbers.
What should you keep in mind if you are on an older Clay plan?
Older Starter, Explorer and Pro plans from before March 2026 still exist for some users. They ran on one credit bucket, and their top-ups carry a 50% premium against 30% on current plans. Before switching, compare three numbers side by side:
- Contacts you keep each month: leave out everything you import and throw away
- Average data cost per row: after your full enrichment path
- Action count per row: including AI steps and every export
If your workflow is mostly moving and scoring data with little paid data, current Launch or Growth usually comes out ahead. If it buys a lot of paid data on every row, the current model still works, but only with tight control over which rows get the expensive steps. If you would rather hand the build to a team that runs it daily, this guide to a Clay agency covers that route.
Get the meetings without running the Clay tables yourself
Reachly builds the Clay workflow, the data, the sending infrastructure and the campaigns, on one flat monthly retainer.
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Clay pricing FAQ
What is the cost per credit for Clay?
Clay lists Data Credits from $0.05 each and Actions at under $0.01 each, both cheaper at higher tiers (Clay pricing page). Clay also says that because it negotiated volume discounts with its data partners, its most-used enrichments cost 50% fewer credits on average.
What is included in Clay's free plan?
The Free plan gives you 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month, unlimited seats and tables, Claygent (Clay's AI web research tool, see our Claygent guide), multi-provider waterfalls and your own API keys, but each table is capped at 200 rows. The 14-day trial of a paid plan is more generous, though finding phone numbers still needs a paid plan.
Do Clay credits roll over?
Only Data Credits do. Unused Actions expire at the end of every billing cycle. If you upgrade partway through a cycle, Clay credits the unused balance back on the upgrade invoice instead of rolling it over, so time upgrades for the start of a cycle when you have credits banked.
What is Clay's new pricing model?
Since March 11, 2026, Clay bills Actions and Data Credits separately. Some teams are still on the older Starter, Explorer or Pro plans, which is why two Clay users can describe completely different bills. A legacy plan can still be the better deal if you spend your credits on platform work rather than bought data.
Who are Clay's main competitors?
The tool buyers most often weigh against Clay is Apollo, which bundles its own contact database and sequencing into a per-seat price, with Basic at $65 per user a month billed monthly. Clay pulls from many data providers and charges by usage instead, so it suits teams that want to build their own enrichment logic. We break down Apollo's plans in Apollo pricing.
