What Clay costs
| Plan | Price per month | Actions included | Data credits included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 500/mo, 6,000/yr | 100/mo, 1,200/yr |
| Launch | $167 | from 180,000/yr | from 30,000/yr |
| Growth | $446 | from 480,000/yr | from 72,000/yr |
| Enterprise | Quote | Custom | Custom |
Read from clay.com/pricing on 26 August 2026, annual billing, with both meters at their starting positions. Annual saves 10%.
The word doing the work in that table is from. Those are the prices at the lowest setting of each slider, not the price of the plan.
How we researched this
We did not run Clay for this page. This is a pricing analysis read from clay.com in a browser on 26 August 2026, with both billing states and every slider position recorded. It is not a hands-on review and we do not score the product here. For what Clay does, see our Clay review.
The headline price is an addition, and you can check it
Most vendors give you a plan price and a footnote. Clay gives you two independent sliders and prints the price of every position on both. That means the headline is derivable, and it is worth deriving because almost nobody does.
Launch, $167 a month. Clay’s actions slider prices 180,000 actions a year at $54 a month. Its data credits slider prices 30,000 credits a year at $113 a month. Fifty four plus one hundred and thirteen is one hundred and sixty seven.
Growth, $446 a month. The actions slider prices 480,000 a year at $185. The data credits slider prices 72,000 a year at $261. One hundred and eighty five plus two hundred and sixty one is four hundred and forty six.
Both add up exactly. This is not a criticism of Clay, which is being unusually open about how the number is built. It is the single most useful thing to understand before you buy, and here is why.
Two thirds of your Clay bill is not the thing Clay is famous for
Clay is known for its actions: the tables, the waterfalls, the Claygent research agent. Actions are the product.
Actions are not most of the bill.
On Launch, the data credit meter is $113 of the $167, which is about 68% of what you pay. On Growth it is $261 of $446, about 59%.
So on the entry plan, roughly two thirds of your money is buying enrichment data rather than the automation you came for. That is not hidden and it is not wrong. It does mean the standard mental model, which is that you buy a Clay plan and the data comes with it, has the causation backwards.
The two meters, priced out
Actions, billed annually.
| Actions per year | Price per month |
|---|---|
| 180,000 | $54 |
| 480,000 | $135 |
| 720,000 | $180 |
| 1,200,000 | $261 |
| 2,400,000 | $486 |
Actions, billed monthly.
| Actions per month | Price per month |
|---|---|
| 15,000 | $60 |
| 40,000 | $150 |
| 60,000 | $200 |
| 100,000 | $290 |
| 200,000 | $540 |
Data credits, billed annually.
| Credits per year | Price per month |
|---|---|
| 30,000 | $113 |
| 72,000 | $261 |
| 120,000 | $414 |
| 240,000 | $792 |
| 600,000 | $1,913 |
Two things worth noticing in those tables.
The action meter gets cheaper as you scale and the data meter does not, much. Going from 180,000 to 2,400,000 actions a year is 13.3 times the volume for 9 times the price. Going from 30,000 to 600,000 data credits is 20 times the volume for 16.9 times the price. Both improve, but neither is the steep volume discount you might expect, and the data meter improves least.
Annual and monthly are not the same allowance. The annual actions slider starts at 180,000 a year. The monthly slider starts at 15,000 a month, which is the same 180,000 annualised, at $60 rather than $54. That is the 10% annual saving, and unlike several vendors in this category, Clay’s claimed 10% is exactly what it delivers.
What Clay does not tell you on the pricing page
What one action is, per operation. The pricing page counts actions without defining how many a waterfall, a Claygent run or a multi-provider lookup consumes. That number decides whether 180,000 is a year of work or a quarter.
Whether either meter rolls over. Not stated in either billing state.
What happens when a meter empties mid-month. No overage rate is published.
Whether you can move one slider without the other. The interface implies yes, and the arithmetic above only works if the two are genuinely independent, but the page does not state it in words.
How Clay compares
Of eleven major sales tools we read on the same day, seven published a price and four quoted on request. Clay is not just in the publishing half, it publishes more granularly than any of the other ten, because it prints the price of every slider position rather than three tiers and a Contact Us.
The trade for that transparency is that Clay is the hardest of the eleven to compare against anything, because it is the only one with two independent meters. A single price column that reads “Clay, from $167” is technically accurate and practically useless, since your real number depends on two settings you have not made yet.
Against its closest competitor on unit, Apollo charges per seat with credits attached, which means Apollo’s bill tracks headcount and Clay’s does not. A five-person team on Apollo Professional annual is $395 a month. The same five people on Clay Launch is $167, because Clay does not charge for the fifth person at all. See Clay vs Apollo for the feature side of that, and our AI sales tool pricing breakdown for where both sit across the category.
What to ask on the call
How many actions does my actual workflow consume per row. Bring a real table, not a hypothetical.
Do actions and data credits roll over, and for how long.
What is the overage rate on each meter, separately.
Can I move one slider mid-term without repricing the other.
What is the year two price at my settings. Every figure here is year one at the starting position.
Verdict
Clay is the most transparent pricing page in this category and also the one most likely to surprise you, which sounds contradictory until you look at the sliders.
The free tier at 500 actions and 100 data credits a month is a look rather than a workspace, in the same way Lavender’s five emails a month is. Launch at $167 is the real entry point, and about two thirds of it is data credits rather than actions. Growth at $446 shifts that balance slightly toward actions, to about 41%.
Buy it on the meter that matches your bottleneck. If you are enriching a large list once, the data meter is your bill and the actions barely matter. If you are running heavy multi-step research on a small list, the reverse. The plan names do not tell you which of those you are, and they are not meant to.
Verified from clay.com on 26 August 2026. Slider pricing changes more quietly than tier pricing, so re-read before it moves a decision.
Written by
FazFaz is the founder of AIToolsBakery. Every tool on this site is personally tested with real-world writing tasks before a single word gets published. No sponsored rankings, no recycled press releases.
Read more about how we test →Frequently Asked Questions
