Clay Pricing 2026: Plans, Credit Costs and Real Monthly Bills

Clay pricing starts at $167 per month on annual billing for the Launch plan and $446 per month for Growth, rising to $185 and $495 respectively when you pay monthly. There is a permanent free plan with 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, and Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment. All figures on this page were read from clay.com's own pricing page on 2 September 2026.

Those numbers explain almost nothing on their own, which is why every forum thread about Clay pricing ends in disagreement. The useful fact is structural: a Clay plan is not one price. Actions and Data Credits are billed on two independent sliders, and the headline you see on the pricing page is simply the two starting positions added together. Launch at $167 is $54 of actions plus $113 of data credits. Growth at $446 is $185 plus $261. Once you see that, the wildly different figures people quote for Clay stop looking like errors.

Clay pricing plans in 2026

Every tier, including Free, comes with unlimited seats and unlimited tables. Clay does not charge per user at all, which is unusual in this category and genuinely matters for a GTM team where several people build tables.

Plan	Annual (per mo)	Monthly	Actions/mo	Data credits/mo	What it adds
Free	$0	$0	500	100	Unlimited seats and tables, provider waterfalls, Claygent enrichment, Clay Sequencer, up to 200 rows per table
Launch	$167	$185	15,000	2,500	Phone number enrichment, job change and signal tracking, email campaign integrations, up to 50,000 rows per table
Growth	$446	$495	40,000	6,000	CRM auto-sync and enrichment, HTTP API integrations, webhook automation, web intent signals, ad audience pushes, priority support
Enterprise	Custom, annual commitment		200,000+	8,300+	Clay API access, data warehouse syncs, SSO, role-based access control, unlimited bulk enrichment, dedicated growth strategist

Enterprise is quoted annually rather than monthly on Clay's own page: 100,000 or more data credits per year and 200,000 or more actions per month. The monthly credit figure above is that annual pool divided by twelve, so treat it as a floor rather than a quote.

Why is Clay pricing so confusing?

Because you are buying two different things on two different meters, and most write-ups only mention one. Actions run the logic in your table: every column that fires on every row is an action. Data Credits pay the outside providers for the information itself: an email lookup, a phone number, a company attribute. You can burn through one while barely touching the other, which is why two teams on the same plan can have completely different experiences.

A concrete example. Say you run a 1,000-row table with eight enrichment columns. That is 8,000 actions before anything is found. If only three of those columns hit a paid provider and only 40% of rows return a match, you have spent 8,000 actions and roughly 1,200 data credits. Flip the table around, with two columns that hit expensive providers on every row, and you spend 2,000 actions and 2,000 credits. Same plan, opposite constraint.

What the sliders actually cost

Both meters expand in fixed steps rather than continuously, and the steps are steep. These are Clay's own published annual figures, expressed as a monthly equivalent.

Actions (annual pool)	Cost per mo	Data credits (annual pool)	Cost per mo
180,000	$54	30,000	$113
480,000	$135	72,000	$261
720,000	$180	120,000	$414
1,200,000	$261	240,000	$792
2,400,000	$486	600,000	$1,913

Read down the right-hand column and the real shape of Clay pricing appears. Data credits are roughly four times the price of actions at the entry step and get relatively more expensive as you climb. Actions are cheap. The data is what you are paying for, and a team that leans hard on waterfall enrichment across many providers will find the credit slider, not the action slider, is what drags the invoice up.

How much does Clay cost per month in practice?

Below are three honest scenarios built from the published steps. They assume annual billing, which is where the headline figures come from.

Team	Plan and sliders	Monthly cost
Solo founder testing a motion	Free, 500 actions and 100 credits	$0
Two-person team enriching a few thousand rows a month	Launch at base: 15,000 actions, 2,500 credits	$167
GTM team syncing the CRM and running signal campaigns	Growth at base: 40,000 actions, 6,000 credits	$446
Same team after doubling the credit slider	Growth, 480,000 actions and 120,000 credits a year	$599

That last row is the one worth pausing on. Moving one slider by a single step added $153 a month without changing the plan name. This is normal on Clay and is not a gotcha, but it does mean the number you agree to in month one is rarely the number you pay in month six. Budget for the slider, not the tier.

What is included on the free plan?

More than most people expect. Clay's free tier gives you 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, unlimited seats, unlimited tables, multi-provider waterfalls, Claygent enrichment and the Clay Sequencer for email. Tables are capped at 200 rows and phone number enrichment is excluded. It is a real evaluation environment rather than a demo, and 100 credits is enough to see whether the waterfall finds contacts your current tool misses.

The one restriction that catches people out is direction of travel. Free users can send email with the Clay Sequencer, but pushing leads out to an external sequencer requires a paid plan. If your intended workflow is Clay for research and a separate tool for sending, the free plan will not let you test the handoff.

What changed in September 2026

Clay rebuilt its Sequencer at the start of September 2026, and it changes how you should read the price. You can now buy inboxes and domains without leaving Clay, warming starts at setup, send timing is handled for you, and replies route to the right rep based on your own logic with a Slack approval step. Clay has quietly become a tool you can send from, not only enrich with.

Whether that saves money depends on what it replaces. If Clay's sequencer takes over from a $55 a month sender, you have not saved anything, because the sender was never the expensive part. The case for consolidating is that the list stays live: leads enter and exit the campaign as the underlying data changes, instead of being exported to a CSV that starts going stale the moment it downloads. That is a real advantage and it is hard to replicate across two tools.

Two gaps remain worth pricing in. There is no native LinkedIn or SMS sequencing, so multichannel still means a second tool, and the sending stack is one release old against competitors with years of deliverability iteration behind them. For a first campaign that is fine. For 50,000 sends a month it is a question to ask before you migrate.

Is Clay worth it?

Clay is worth its price when building the list is genuinely the bottleneck, and it is poor value when it is not. That sounds obvious and yet it is the single most common way teams waste money here. If you already know your 400 target accounts and the real problem is that nobody has time to write to them properly, an enrichment engine solves nothing. You are paying $167 a month to do faster what was never slow.

The teams that get their money's worth share a pattern. They are running lists that need to be rebuilt continuously rather than bought once, they care about signals like a funding round or a new VP of Sales, and they need attributes no static database sells, which is where Claygent reading the actual website earns its keep. Under those conditions nothing else on the market is close, and the credit bill is cheap against the alternative of an analyst doing it manually.

There is also a real cost that never appears on the pricing page. Clay has a steep learning curve, widely acknowledged by people who like it. It looks like a spreadsheet and behaves like a runtime, and a table that quietly re-runs an expensive column on every row is how first invoices get surprising. Most teams that succeed with Clay have someone who owns it. Budget that person's time alongside the subscription.

One practical habit helps more than any pricing trick: set the credit budget at the workbook level if you are on a plan that supports it, and check the credit reporting dashboard weekly for the first month. Overspend on Clay is almost never a pricing problem. It is a table that got left running.

Clay pricing versus the sending tools

Clay is not really competing with cold email platforms on price, and comparing the headlines makes both look wrong. For context, though, here is where it sits against tools teams commonly run alongside it.

Tool	Entry price (annual)	Billing model	What you are buying
Clay	$167/mo Launch	Two consumption meters, unlimited seats	Enrichment, research and list building
Lemlist	$55/mo Email plan	Flat, unlimited users	Sequencing plus a 650M-contact database
Apollo	$49/seat/mo Basic	Per seat plus credits	A large contact database with sequencing and a dialer
Smartlead	$32.50/mo Base	Flat per plan, unlimited inboxes	High-volume sending infrastructure

Most teams running Clay seriously pay for two products, not one, and that is the honest way to budget it. If you are weighing the pair directly, the full breakdown is in our lemlist vs Clay comparison, and the wider market is covered in our guide to cold email software pricing compared.

Once enriched records start flowing into a warehouse on Clay's Enterprise sync, a second question tends to arrive with them: which provider actually supplied each field, and when did it last change. Teams that reach that point usually end up wanting a way to trace where every field in the warehouse came from, because an enrichment pipeline that nobody can audit produces confident numbers that quietly go stale.

Frequently asked questions about Clay pricing

How much does Clay cost per month?

Clay Launch is $167 a month on annual billing or $185 billed monthly, and Growth is $446 annually or $495 monthly. The free plan is permanent and includes 500 actions and 100 data credits a month with unlimited seats. Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment, starting from 200,000 actions a month and 100,000 data credits a year.

What is the difference between actions and data credits in Clay?

Actions pay for running the logic in your table: every column that fires on a row costs one action. Data credits pay outside providers for the information itself, such as an email address, a phone number or a company attribute. They are billed on separate sliders and priced very differently, with credits costing roughly four times more than actions at the entry step.

Does Clay have a free plan?

Yes, and it is permanent rather than a trial. The free tier includes 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, unlimited seats and tables, multi-provider waterfalls, Claygent enrichment and the Clay Sequencer for email. Tables are limited to 200 rows and phone number enrichment is excluded. Sending leads to an external sequencer requires a paid plan.

Do Clay credits roll over?

Partly. On monthly billing you can roll over up to one month's worth of credits. On annual billing you can roll over 15% of the annual pool. Annual plans also grant all credits up front rather than releasing them monthly, which suits teams that enrich in large bursts rather than at a steady rate.

Is Clay worth the price for a small team?

It depends entirely on whether list building is your bottleneck. If you rebuild target lists continuously, act on signals like funding rounds or new hires, or need attributes only a web-research agent can gather, Clay pays for itself quickly. If you already have a solid list and the real problem is writing and sending, a $55 sequencer does more for you than a $167 enrichment engine.

What is the cheapest way to use Clay?

Start on the free plan and stay there until you hit a real limit, then move to annual Launch, which is $18 a month cheaper than monthly and grants the full credit pool up front. Keep the action slider at its base step while you learn, since actions are the cheap meter, and expand the credit slider only when the reporting dashboard shows you are genuinely running out.

Before you buy

Clay pricing rewards teams who know exactly which part of outbound is broken. If the answer is "we cannot find and qualify the right accounts fast enough," it is one of the few tools with no real substitute and the credit bill is worth it. If the answer is "we have the accounts and the emails are not good enough," you are shopping in the wrong aisle, and a sequencer that writes and sends will move your reply rate further than any enrichment waterfall.

Whichever way that lands, price the second tool at the same time. Clay plus a sender is the normal configuration, and a budget built on the Clay headline alone will be short. If you want to see what the sending half costs, the best cold email software roundup lays out the market, and how to choose cold email software works through the decision itself.