Clay pricing, Clay credits, and what Actions actually cost per month.

What Clay actually charges for, on each of its two meters

Clay bills on two independent meters, and understanding the split explains most of what confuses people about the price. Data Credits buy data and AI from vendors in Clay's marketplace: the email address, the phone number, the company detail, the enrichment a third party actually provides. Actions measure platform usage, meaning the enrichment and go-to-market execution Clay itself performs. Clay's own framing is that two things are happening at once, Clay doing work and Clay buying data on your behalf, and each is priced separately.

The practical consequence is that two teams running identical row counts can get very different bills. A team pulling waterfall-enriched phone numbers on 20,000 companies is spending mostly Data Credits. A team running heavy internal workflow logic against data it already owns is spending mostly Actions. Before you price anything, work out which of those two you are, because the ladders move independently and the cheaper plan for one profile is the expensive one for the other.

How much do Clay credits cost, in plain dollars

Clay publishes that Data Credits start at $0.05 each and become more cost-effective as volume grows, and that Actions start at less than $0.01 each and get cheaper with scale within each plan. So a Data Credit is worth at least five Actions, and usually more. That ratio is the most useful single fact on this page, because it tells you where to look first when a bill surprises you.

You can check the arithmetic against the ladders. On Launch, 30,000 Data Credits a year costs $113 a month, which is $1,356 a year, or about $0.045 a credit. At the top of the monthly ladder, 50,000 credits a month costs $2,125, which is about $0.043 each. The curve is real but shallow, so do not expect volume to rescue a bill driven by expensive enrichments. Actions tell a different story: 180,000 a year for $54 a month is $648 a year, about $0.0036 an Action, well under the published floor of a cent.

Two things reduce Data Credit spend sharply, and both are worth knowing before you buy. Clay states that if an enrichment returns no result you are not charged Data Credits or Actions, so failed lookups are genuinely free rather than billed as attempts. And if you bring your own API keys for a third-party provider, you skip Data Credit costs for that provider entirely and only spend Actions on the platform work. For a team that already holds direct data contracts, that second lever can remove the larger half of a Clay bill outright.

Do Clay credits roll over? The two meters answer differently

This is the most searched question in the cluster and the answer is genuinely split, which is why short answers elsewhere get it wrong. Actions do not roll over. They reset each billing cycle because they represent the platform capacity your plan includes, and Clay notes each plan is sized to cover about 90 percent of customer usage at that tier. Data Credits do roll over. On Launch and Growth, unused credits accumulate up to twice your monthly credit amount, so a 10,000 credit plan can bank up to 20,000 in total.

Enterprise is handled separately: those customers can roll over up to 15 percent of the prior year's purchased credits, provided they renew at an equal or higher commitment. The free plan gets no rollover at all. Put together, the sizing logic for the two meters is opposite. Buy Actions close to your real requirement, because anything unused vanishes at the end of the cycle. Data Credits are more forgiving, since a quiet month banks capacity for a busy one, up to the 2x ceiling.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is the top-up price. Clay lists credit top-ups on Launch and Growth as buying more at a 30 percent premium. So the cost of guessing low is a real penalty on every extra credit, while the cost of guessing high on Actions is total loss of the surplus. There is no comfortable side to err on, which is a fair description of consumption pricing in general and the reason flat pricing exists as a category at all.

What Clay costs at the top of the ladder, not the bottom

Every roundup quotes Clay as $167 and $446 a month. Those are floors, and the distance to the ceiling is the part worth planning for. On Launch, the Actions ladder runs 15,000 a month at $60, 40,000 at $150, 60,000 at $200, 100,000 at $290 and 200,000 at $540. The Data Credits ladder runs 2,500 a month at $125, 6,000 at $290, 10,000 at $460, 20,000 at $880 and 50,000 at $2,125. Take the top of both and Launch costs about $2,665 a month, roughly sixteen times its headline.

Growth starts higher and ends in a similar place. Its Actions ladder runs 40,000 a month at $205 through to 200,000 at $850, and its Data Credits ladder 6,000 at $290 through to 50,000 at $2,125, so the top of both is about $2,975 a month. The overlap is the useful observation: at high volume the two plans converge, and what you are really buying with Growth is the feature set, CRM and warehouse sync, HTTP API access, webhook signals, web intent and priority support, rather than a better rate.

Annual billing saves 10 percent and releases all credits up front, which suits lumpy work. It also commits you, and given how far apart the ladder rungs sit, committing before you have measured a month of real usage is how teams end up on the wrong rung for a year. Run a month monthly, read the credit reporting dashboard, then commit.

The seat question, where Clay is genuinely generous

Clay includes unlimited seats and unlimited tables on every plan, including the free one. In a category where most go-to-market tools charge $50 to $150 per user per month, that is a real and underappreciated advantage, and it changes who should be in the tool. There is no cost reason to restrict Clay access to one operator, so the whole revenue team can look at the same workbooks.

The flip side is that unlimited seats do not mean unlimited usage. Everyone you add draws from the same two meters, so access is free while activity is not. This is the same trap we documented in Zapier Agents pricing, where a team shares one activity pool rather than getting an allowance each. Generous seat policies in consumption products almost always mean the meter is doing the work, and Clay is no exception.

Is Clay free, and what the free plan really covers

There is a genuine free plan and it is more useful than most. It includes unlimited seats and tables, multi-provider waterfalls, Claygent enrichment, sending email through Clay's sequencer, and bringing your own API key. The allowance is 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month, and tables are capped at 200 rows. Phone number enrichment is excluded, which is the main functional limit rather than a volume one.

As a way to learn Clay it is excellent. As a production tier it is not intended to work: 100 Data Credits at roughly $0.05 of value is about five dollars of data a month, which will not survive contact with a real prospect list. There is also a 14-day trial of the paid plans if you want to test the parts the free plan holds back. The honest read is that the free plan answers "is this tool for me" very well and "can I run my outbound on this" not at all.

Is there a Clay pricing calculator, and what it will and will not tell you

Clay publishes a pricing calculator on its pricing page, and it is worth using to price the ladders. What it cannot do is tell you how many Data Credits your actual work will consume, because that depends on which enrichments you run, how many providers a waterfall tries before it succeeds, and which model tier your Claygents use. Clay is explicit that about 80 percent of models cost a flat number of Data Credits per task, while variable models show an estimate marked with a tilde, and that 75 percent of runs come in under that estimate.

That last figure is more honest than most vendors manage, and it also tells you the estimate is a ceiling roughly three quarters of the time rather than a mean. Clay's own advice is to match your needs to the right tier rather than trying to predict exact Data Credit or Action volumes, which is a reasonable admission that forecasting consumption up front is hard. Our own view, having now priced five agent platforms line by line, is that this is the structural weakness of consumption pricing rather than a flaw in Clay specifically. We wrote up why these estimates come in low so consistently in why AI agent bills exceed estimates.

Where Clay is clearly the right buy

If your bottleneck is data coverage, buy Clay. Waterfall enrichment across a marketplace of more than 150 providers, in one interface, with per-provider fallback, is a genuinely hard thing to build and Clay built it. If you have a GTM engineer or an operator who enjoys living in a workbook, the ceiling is high and the free seats mean the whole team can see the output. If you already hold direct data contracts, the bring-your-own-key path makes Clay cheaper than its sticker price rather than more expensive.

The case for us is narrower and worth stating precisely. You are a small business or a founder-led team. You do not have someone whose job is maintaining enrichment tables, and you do not want the job yourself. You want a defined outcome rather than a platform to build on: the research done, the list built, the outreach drafted, the inbox triaged, the report produced. And you want the bill to be the same in March as it was in February. That is what a flat-rate agent is for, and it is why our price is one number. If you are weighing the two head on, we set out the differences in detail on our Clay alternative page, and the wider category in AI lead generation software.

How to work out your own Clay number in fifteen minutes

Start with the data, because Data Credits dominate most bills. Count the rows you will enrich in a month and the number of enrichments per row. Multiply the two, then multiply by $0.05 as a conservative per-credit figure. Subtract anything you can serve from your own API keys, since that spend disappears entirely. That gives you a Data Credit budget and tells you which rung of the credit ladder you need.

Then size Actions separately and deliberately low, because they never roll over. Take Clay's note that each plan's included Actions cover about 90 percent of customer usage at that tier as a starting assumption, and remember you can step up a tier at any time while you cannot recover a surplus. Add the two ladder prices together, and that sum, not the plan name, is your monthly Clay cost. Finally, add a 30 percent contingency on the Data Credit side to reflect the top-up premium if you run short. Compare that total against $149 flat and the answer will be obvious in either direction, which is the point of doing the arithmetic rather than reading a listicle.