Clay pricing explained: plans, credits and what you really pay

How much does Clay cost?

Clay costs $0 on the Free plan, from $185 a month on Launch and from $495 a month on Growth when billed monthly, or $167 and $446 a month billed annually, according to clay.com/pricing, checked on Oct 27, 2026. Enterprise is custom. Those are starting prices: actions and data credits are sold in tiers, so heavy enrichment costs more.

Clay is a data enrichment and outbound workflow platform. You build tables, pull data from many providers and run actions on each row. That flexibility is why the bill is hard to predict: you pay in two meters at once. Every Clay figure in this article comes from the official Clay pricing page, which we opened on October 27, 2026 in both its Monthly and Annual views. Clay can change any of it without notice, and we do not use prices from third-party blogs.

If you sell to local businesses, such as restaurants, dental clinics, auto shops or contractors, there is a second question worth asking before you pay anyone: do you need a data workbench, or a list of local businesses that already have the problem you fix? We come back to that after the numbers.

What are the Clay pricing plans?

Clay sells four plans. Free costs nothing and is capped hard. Launch adds phone enrichment, signals and email campaigns. Growth adds CRM sync, HTTP API integrations and webhooks. Enterprise is quoted by sales on an annual commitment. Launch and Growth both show a 14-day trial button and a buy-now option on the pricing page.

Source for every cell: clay.com/pricing, checked on Oct 27, 2026. The Free plan is real, but it is a sandbox. Its comparison table marks phone number enrichment, signals, email campaigns, custom functions and scheduled runs as not included, and it stops at 200 rows per table. That is enough to learn the tool and not enough to run a prospecting week.

What are Clay credits and actions?

Clay data credits are the currency you spend when Clay buys data or AI for you, such as an email address, a phone number or a company detail from one of its 150+ data partners. Clay actions measure the platform work around that data: enriching a row, running a table, calling an AI model, sending data to another tool or exporting it. According to clay.com/pricing, checked on Oct 27, 2026, data credits start at $0.05 each and actions at less than $0.01 each, and both get cheaper at higher tiers.

Three rules from the same page change what you actually pay:

1. Empty results are free. If an enrichment returns no result, Clay says you are not charged data credits or actions.
2. Your own API keys skip credits. A run with your own key for a data provider or AI model uses no data credits but still counts as one action.
3. Top-ups cost more. Extra data credits on Launch and Growth are sold at a 30% premium, according to the plan comparison table.

Actions reset every billing cycle and do not roll over. Credit rollover is where the page contradicts itself. The FAQ says unused credits on Launch and Growth can accumulate up to 2x the monthly amount, for example 20,000 banked on a 10,000-credit plan. The comparison table on the same page lists rollover as 15% of annual credits for both plans. Ask Clay to confirm in writing before you plan around rollover.

AI steps have their own rule. Clay says about 80% of its models cost a flat number of data credits per task, while token-heavy models are billed on actual token use and shown as an estimate with a tilde (~). Clay adds that 75% of those runs cost less than the estimate. In practice, a deep research column can burn credits much faster than a simple email lookup.

Is Clay cheaper monthly or annually?

Annual billing is cheaper. The pricing page has a Monthly and an Annual switch, and the Annual option is labeled "Save 10%". The $185 and $495 starting prices are the Monthly view; the $167 and $446 figures are the Annual view, where allotments are shown per year (for example 180,000 actions and 30,000 data credits a year on Launch) and, per the comparison table, all credits are granted up front.

Each plan price is simply the lowest actions tier plus the lowest data credits tier. On Launch, $60 for 15,000 actions plus $125 for 2,500 credits gives $185 a month. On Growth, $205 for 40,000 actions plus $290 for 6,000 credits gives $495. You can move each slider up on its own, which is why the bill grows with use.

Illustrative example: a small team on Launch that keeps the entry actions tier but needs 10,000 data credits a month would pay $60 plus $460, or $520 a month on monthly billing, and $54 plus $414, or $468 a month billed annually. The lesson is that credits are the expensive half of the bill: 20,000 credits alone cost $880 a month on monthly billing.

Is Clay worth it for a small agency that sells to local businesses?

Clay is worth it when you need to combine many data sources, build repeatable enrichment workflows and have someone who enjoys building them. For a freelancer or small agency that wants local businesses with a reason to buy, it is usually more tool than the job needs, and the learning curve is part of the price.

A fair split of who benefits:

• Good fit for Clay: teams with RevOps skills, a CRM to keep in sync and thousands of company records to enrich from varied providers.
• Weaker fit: people selling website redesigns, review management, cleaning, accounting or IT support to local shops and clinics. They mostly need three things: the right businesses, a way to reach them and a place to track replies.

With Clay, you assemble that yourself. You design the table, choose providers, write the prompts that judge fit and watch credits so a bad column does not burn the month. It can be done, and it is flexible, but it is a project before it is a pipeline.

There is also a data gap for this market. Most B2B data is about companies and job titles, while the strongest buying signal for a local business is often public: what its own customers say in Google reviews. A Harvard Business School working paper, Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com, found that a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue, an effect driven by independent restaurants. So a clinic whose reviews keep mentioning unanswered calls, or a restaurant with complaints about online ordering, has a visible problem and a revenue reason to fix it. That is the opening a local seller needs, and it rarely shows up in an enrichment column.

What is a more direct option for local business prospecting?

Vonsel is an AI sales agent built for exactly that case. You tell it what you do and what you offer, and it looks for the local businesses that truly need you. It reads each business's Google reviews, spots concrete complaints and matches them to your offer, so you get a list with the reason each business fits. It returns roughly 300 ideal businesses in about a minute, work that would take days by hand.

Contact details come with them: email, phone, WhatsApp and social profiles, gathered from Google Maps, Bing Maps, national business directories and the businesses' own websites. Everything lands in a CRM with a dashboard and a kanban board, and the AI can write and send personalized email, WhatsApp, Instagram and LinkedIn messages and follow up.

This is not a claim that Vonsel replaces Clay for every job. If you enrich large company lists from many providers, Clay is built for that. For a local-business seller, the shorter path is a ready list that already explains why each business needs you. If you are weighing other sales data platforms too, our breakdowns of Apollo pricing and ZoomInfo pricing use the same method, official pages only, so the three are easy to compare.

How would a local seller use each tool in a week?

Illustrative example: a freelancer in Phoenix sells review-response and reputation services to HVAC companies. The two routes look different from day one.

With Clay:

1. Build or import a company table and pick providers for company and contact data.
2. Add enrichment columns, then an AI column that judges whether each company looks like a fit.
3. Run a small batch, check how many data credits and actions it used, then adjust before scaling up.
4. Connect an email tool, or use Clay's email campaigns on Launch and above, and track replies in your own CRM.

With Vonsel:

1. Describe your services and your ideal client in plain language.
2. Review the businesses it returns, each with the complaint that makes it a fit and its contact details.
3. Move the best ones through the kanban board and send personalized messages.
4. Follow up on the replies from the same place.

The difference is where the reason to buy comes from. If you want to see why a specific complaint beats a generic pitch, our guide to finding businesses with negative reviews walks through it, and our cold email templates for local agencies show how to turn that complaint into a first line.

What should you check before emailing the businesses you find?

Check that your messages will land in the inbox, because the tool you use to find businesses does not change how mailbox providers read your email. NIST's Trustworthy Email guideline (SP 800-177 Rev. 1) recommends mechanisms for authenticating a sending domain: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and DMARC, and notes it will also be useful for small or medium sized organizations. In short:

1. Authenticate your sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
2. Write a subject line that matches the message and say clearly who you are.
3. Give a clear way to opt out and honor it promptly.

Bounces hurt your sender reputation whichever tool found the address, so our guide to verifying email addresses is worth a read before your first send. And if you are also comparing Google Maps tools rather than data platforms, Vonsel vs Scrap.io explains the difference between a scraper that gives you rows and an agent that gives you qualified businesses.