Clay is still worth it if you buy most of your data through Clay's marketplace or you are still changing your workflows every few weeks. It is harder to justify if you bring your own API keys and run the same multi-step workflow on thousands of records a month, because every step now counts as a billable Action. The March 11, 2026 change made data cheaper and orchestration paid.
Prices below come from clay.com/pricing and Clay's pricing announcement, checked on October 24, 2026.
What changed on March 11, 2026
- Credits became Data Credits. They pay for emails, phone numbers and company data from Clay's 150+ providers. Clay cut marketplace data prices by 50 to 90%, and Data Credits now start at about $0.05 each.
- Actions are new. Each enrichment step, AI call, HTTP request, push to another tool or export counts as one Action. Actions start at under $0.01 each.
- Bringing your own key no longer makes a run free. A run on your own API key uses no Data Credits, but it still uses one Action.
- Plans were renamed and repriced. Launch starts at $185 a month, and Growth at $495, against $800 for the old Pro plan.
- Top-ups got cheaper. The premium on extra credits dropped from 50% to 30%.
Clay's own example shows the trade. One inbound workflow cost 20 credits per record on the legacy plans and 7.3 Data Credits on the new ones, plus an Action for each step.
Clay plans now
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Actions/month | Data Credits/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 500 | 100 |
| Launch | $185 | $167 | 15,000 | 2,500 |
| Growth | $495 | $446 | 40,000 | 6,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom, annual | 200,000+ | 100,000+ | |
Each plan price is two parts you can raise separately. On monthly billing, Launch's $185 is $60 for 15,000 Actions plus $125 for 2,500 Data Credits. Growth's $495 is $205 for 40,000 Actions plus $290 for 6,000 Data Credits. Higher Data Credit tiers on Launch run $290 for 6,000, $460 for 10,000 and $880 for 20,000 a month.
What three common setups cost now
These use Clay's published tier prices on monthly billing. Your credit cost per record depends on which providers your waterfall hits, so treat the data figures as a range to check against your own usage report.
1. A team buying data through Clay: usually cheaper
A team enriches 1,000 new contacts a month with an email waterfall, company data and one AI research step, about 5 Actions and 7 Data Credits per contact. That is 5,000 Actions and about 7,000 Data Credits. On Launch that means the base $60 Action tier plus the $460 tier for 10,000 Data Credits: about $520 a month. In Clay's own legacy comparison, a similar workflow used 20 credits per record instead of 7.3. Data-heavy users are the group the change helped.
2. A team bringing its own keys: now pays for orchestration
A team runs 3,000 contacts a month through 5 steps, all on its own API keys. Data Credits used: zero. Actions used: 15,000, which fills Launch exactly. The bill is the $185 Launch minimum plus what the team pays its providers. If any step calls a custom HTTP API or a webhook, the team needs Growth at $495, because those features are not on Launch. Before March, this team's Clay cost on BYOK runs was close to nothing beyond the plan fee. This is the group writing "is Clay still worth it" posts.
3. A team syncing status back every day: the expensive case
Workflows that re-run on the same records burn Actions with no new data. Syncing email reply status back into Clay once a day for 3,000 contacts is 90,000 Actions a month, one per record per day, which is past Growth's 40,000. Daily refreshes, re-scoring and repeated CRM pushes belong in the CRM or a cheaper scheduler, with Clay used only where it adds data.
When Clay is still worth paying for
- You are still testing segments. Switching between 150+ providers in one table is Clay's real advantage while you work out which sources cover your market.
- Non-technical people run the workflows. A shared, visual table that sales and ops can edit costs less than an engineer maintaining scripts.
- You buy most of your data through Clay. The 50 to 90% data price cut often outweighs the new Action charges.
- You need CRM sync, web intent and ads audiences in one place. Growth bundles them at $495, below the old Pro price.
When it no longer adds up
- Stable workflows on your own keys, at volume. Teams in this position on Reddit mostly moved orchestration to n8n or scripts and call 2 or 3 providers directly.
- Many steps per record. Every extra step multiplies your Actions by the number of rows.
- You only needed HTTP API on a small plan. That feature moved from the old Explorer plan to Growth.
If you are in this group, our comparison of cheaper alternatives to Clay prices out Databar, Bitscale, n8n and Claude Code setups. If you would rather run the same workflows yourself, we looked at whether Claude Code can replace Clay.
Check this before you switch
- Break down Actions by table. One team in the r/gtmengineering thread found two of its six tables used most of its Actions. Moving those two workflows to direct API calls fixed the bill without a full migration.
- Use the lookups that don't count. A user in the same thread reported that CRM lookups and lookups between Clay tables don't use Actions, so reference data can sit in its own table.
- Filter before enriching. Cheap firmographic filters first, email and phone waterfalls only on accounts that pass.
- Check your legacy deadline. Legacy Starter, Explorer and Pro customers can stay on their old plans with no Action charges. Clay's docs say the newer features those plans get for free end on December 31, 2026, and any plan change moves you to the new pricing.
What decides your Clay bill
For most outbound teams the Clay bill tracks how many records they enrich, and that number comes from how tightly they define who to contact. A list built on a clear ICP and real buying signals needs fewer rows, fewer steps and fewer refreshes, whichever tool runs it. If you want that list and the outbound program around it handled for you, that is the work KomsGro's B2B cold outbound agency does.