Clay Pricing: What Credits Really Cost Per Enriched Row

Clay's Launch plan shows a headline of $167 a month, and that number is two purchases added together. The plan page's own dropdowns break it out: 180,000 actions a year at $54 a month, plus 30,000 data credits a year at $113 a month. Add them and you get the headline.

Once you see that, the pricing model stops being confusing. Clay bills in two separate currencies, they scale at different rates, and the one most people watch is not the one that dominates their bill.

Clay's public pricing page, captured August 2026.

The two currencies

Clay states the distinction on the pricing page itself:

Actions measure platform usage: enrichment & GTM execution. Data credits buy data & AI from vendors in Clay's marketplace.

An action is Clay doing something. A data credit is Clay buying something on your behalf from a provider in its marketplace. Running a column costs actions. Getting an email address back from a data vendor costs credits.

That split is why two teams on the same plan can have very different bills. A team doing heavy filtering, formatting and workflow logic burns actions. A team enriching contact data across many providers burns credits. Most outbound teams are the second kind, and credits are roughly ten times more expensive per unit.

What each unit actually costs

Both currencies are sold on a ladder, and Clay publishes every rung. Dividing the annual price by the annual allowance gives the real unit cost.

Two things fall out of those tables that the plan cards do not tell you.

A data credit costs roughly twelve times what an action costs. At the entry rung it is $0.0452 against $0.0036. If your bill is growing and you are not sure why, it is almost certainly credits.

The volume discount is much better on actions than on credits. Actions fall about 33% per unit from the smallest rung to the largest, a thirteen-fold increase in volume. Data credits fall about 15% across a twenty-fold increase. Buying in bulk barely helps on the currency that costs the most, which is worth knowing before you commit to a bigger annual tier to "get the discount".

Those figures are the annual toggle, which Clay lists as saving 10% against monthly. Monthly data credits start at $125 for 2,500 a month, which works out at $0.05 a credit.

ActionsClay doing something

• Enrichment and GTM execution
• From $0.0036 down to $0.0024 each
• Volume discount around 33%
• Burned by workflow logic, formatting and filtering

Data creditsClay buying something

• Data and AI from marketplace vendors
• From $0.0452 down to $0.0383 each
• Volume discount around 15%
• Burned by contact data, and roughly 12x an action

Why a row is not a credit

The question people actually want answered is what one enriched row costs, and the honest answer is that it depends on how many providers the row touches.

A waterfall exists precisely because no single provider covers everyone. If your first provider hits, the row cost one lookup. If it misses and the second is tried, the row cost two. A row that fails every provider still consumed credits at each attempt, and it produced nothing.

That last case is the one that quietly dominates a bill on a hard list. Your cost per enriched row is not the cost of a lookup, it is the cost of all lookups divided by the ones that succeeded. On a list with a 50% overall hit rate and three providers attempted per miss, the arithmetic gets away from you quickly.

The practical consequences are ordering and stopping, which we cover in detail in building a Clay waterfall that does not waste credits and in the general waterfall enrichment guide.

The free tier and where it stops

The free plan is more usable than most, and it has one limit that decides whether it works for you.

You get 6,000 actions and 1,200 data credits a year, which is 500 actions and 100 credits a month, plus unlimited seats and tables. You can run multi-provider waterfalls, enrich with Claygent, bring your own API keys and send through Clay's sequencer.

The constraint is 200 rows per table. That is a genuine cap on evaluation rather than a soft nudge, and it means the free tier is for learning the tool rather than for running a real list. The bring-your-own-key option is the interesting part of the free plan: if you already hold provider contracts, you can drive them through Clay's workflow layer and pay Clay only in actions.

Estimating your own bill before you buy

Four numbers give you a defensible estimate, and you can get all of them from a sample.

1. Step 1Take a real sample

   200 rows of the list you actually intend to work, not a clean test list.

2. Step 2Run the waterfall you intend to run

   Count credits consumed and rows successfully enriched, separately.

3. Step 3Divide by successes, not attempts

   Total credits divided by usable rows is your true cost per enriched row.

4. Step 4Multiply by monthly volume, then add actions

   Actions are the smaller number but they are not zero, especially with heavy workflow logic.

The sample has to be representative. Enrichment hit rates vary enormously by seniority, company size and geography, so a sample drawn from easy rows produces an estimate that will not survive contact with your real list.

Before you buy

• ✓Yes: You know your credits-per-enriched-row on a representative sample
• ✓Yes: Your waterfall stops after the first hit rather than running every provider
• ✓Yes: Duplicate rows are removed before enrichment, not after
• ✕No: You are buying a larger tier mainly for the data-credit discount
• ~Depends: You hold direct provider contracts worth driving with your own API keys

Choosing between Launch and Growth

The jump from Launch to Growth is $167 to $446 a month, and the allowances behind it go from 180,000 actions and 30,000 credits a year to 480,000 actions and 72,000 credits. Roughly 2.7 times the price for 2.7 times the actions and 2.4 times the credits, so the tier jump is close to linear and is not itself a discount.

What you are actually buying at Growth is the feature line rather than the volume. Auto-sync and enrich to CRM, syncing with a data warehouse, integrating with any HTTP API, automating any signal via webhook, web intent signals, unlimited ad audiences and priority support. Launch covers phone enrichment, signal tracking on job changes, email campaigns via integrations and reusable functions.

That makes the decision cleaner than a volume calculation. If your workflow ends when a CSV or a sequencer push is produced, Launch does the job and you scale the allowances underneath it. If Clay needs to write back into a CRM or warehouse continuously, that capability sits at Growth and you are paying for the integration rather than for the credits.

The trap is upgrading for volume. Because the tiers scale nearly linearly and each tier's allowances are individually expandable, buying a higher tier to get more credits usually gains you nothing that expanding the allowance on your current tier would not.

What to do before an annual commitment

Annual billing saves 10% and locks the shape of your usage for a year, which is the part worth thinking about.

Outbound volume is lumpy. A campaign build consumes credits in bursts, then a month passes with almost nothing while sends run and replies get worked. Annual allowances are quoted per year, which suits that pattern better than monthly allowances that expire, so the annual toggle is usually right on the credits line even beyond the discount.

Two questions to settle first. Do you have direct contracts with any providers, in which case bringing your own key moves that volume from credits to actions and shrinks the credits allowance you need. And is your hit rate stable enough to forecast, because a list that gets harder mid-year consumes credits faster per usable row and the allowance you sized against last quarter's list will not hold.

Where Clay is genuinely cheap and where it is not

Clay is cheap as a workflow layer. Actions cost fractions of a cent, the free tier is real, and the ability to sequence providers conditionally is what stops you paying every vendor for every row.

Clay is not cheap as a data source, because it is not a data source. It is reselling marketplace vendors, and a marginal markup on someone else's data is the business model. If you have volume and a direct contract with a provider, bringing your own key and paying Clay in actions is materially cheaper than buying the same data as credits.

The decision is therefore not really Clay against another tool. It is whether you want one workflow layer orchestrating many providers, which is worth paying for, or whether you have one provider and a simple need, in which case the workflow layer is overhead. Our end-to-end Clay lead generation workflow shows what the first shape looks like with the costs attached, and best Clay alternatives covers the second.

The short version

Clay charges in actions and data credits, the headline price is the two added together, and data credits cost roughly twelve times what actions cost while discounting far less at volume. Your cost per enriched row is total credits divided by successful rows, which is a different and larger number than the price of one lookup. Estimate it from 200 representative rows before you commit to an annual tier.

If you would rather have the enriched list and the campaign delivered than build and meter the stack yourself, you can see what a campaign would look like for your market.

Clay pricing verified against clay.com/pricing as of August 2026, with per-unit costs calculated from Clay's own published allowances. Verify current terms with the vendor before relying on them.

Sources: Clay pricing