Clay Pricing: Two Credit Types, One Bill

Clay's published tiers are simple enough to read: a free plan with 100 Data Credits a month, Launch at $185 a month, Growth at $495 a month, and Enterprise contracts reported around $30,000 or more a year. Forecasting an actual bill from those numbers is considerably harder, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of disclosure.

Following its March 2026 pricing overhaul, Clay meters two different things separately, and one of them varies by a factor of twenty depending on decisions made inside a workflow rather than on the plan.

Data Credits pay for enrichment lookups. Actions pay for workflow steps, including sending email through Clay's own sequencer. A table that enriches a row and then does three things with the result draws from both pools, and running out of either one stops the workflow even if the other has capacity left.

That means two forecasts, not one. A workflow-heavy setup with light enrichment and an enrichment-heavy setup with minimal automation can sit on the same plan and hit entirely different walls.

Clay aggregates over 100 underlying data providers behind one interface, and the credit cost of an enrichment step depends on which provider that step routes to. Published 2026 breakdowns put lighter sources near 1 credit and premium providers accessed through Clay, ZoomInfo being the common example, at roughly 5 to 20 credits for the same logical operation.

This is the whole point of the product rather than a flaw: aggregation is the value, and premium data costs more because it costs Clay more. The budgeting consequence is real though. Predicting monthly spend requires knowing not just how many rows get enriched, but which providers each waterfall step actually hits, which changes as providers are added, reordered, or fall through to a fallback.

The workable approach is to build one representative table, run it against a few hundred real rows, then read actual consumption off the usage view rather than reasoning about it in advance.

If the job is genuinely a workflow, multi-step enrichment across several providers, conditional logic, AI steps, outreach from the same table, Clay does something no single API replicates, and the credit complexity is the cost of that flexibility. Teams building lists interactively usually find it faster than writing integrations against each provider directly.

The case where the overhead is not worth it is narrower than it looks: a table doing one enrichment step per row, no branching, no AI, no send. That is a data lookup wearing a spreadsheet, and it carries the full variability of provider routing for none of the workflow benefit.

For that specific pattern, Kooperativa is one dataset behind one API at $499/mo, or $449/mo on a single annual payment, with unlimited requests and no credit accounting of any kind, since there is exactly one provider and one price. Bulk enrich takes up to 500 profile IDs per request, and the only ceiling is a shared 500 requests per minute rate limit.

It is not a workflow builder and does not aggregate providers, so it does not replace what Clay sells. Two honest limits: it returns profile and firmographic data, not email addresses or phone numbers, and running both is a common and reasonable setup, Clay for interactive list building, a direct API for anything scheduled where a predictable monthly cost matters more than flexibility.