Clay repriced in March 2026. If you built your budget from a blog post written before that, you are planning against a ladder that no longer exists. Which of the four versions in circulation is yours?
Clay's own announcement is dated March 11, 2026, authored by Varun Anand and Karan Parekh, and it opens by saying the update "reduces data costs, and simplifies and improves the value of our plans." That sentence is public and signed. Four of the explainers ranking above this page were written as if it never happened. The tier that used to cost $800 a month now costs $495, and the entry plan moved from $149 to $185, so your spreadsheet is wrong in both directions at once. Here is the part that should make you uneasy. Three of those stale pages also describe a credit model Clay has since re-priced, and one prints a plan name the vendor has never published.
The live Clay ladder, and the three versions still in circulation
Everything below was read off the vendor's own surfaces on 2026-09-27. This is Clay the GTM data platform, not pottery clay. Four rows, no interpretation yet.
Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Data Credits / month | Actions / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 | $0 | 100 | 500 |
Launch | $185 | $167 | 2,500 | 15,000 |
Growth | $495 | $446 | 6,000 | 40,000 |
Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 100,000+ | 200,000+ |
Source: clay.com/pricing, read 2026-09-27. The page's own FAQ prints "Launch (starting at $185/mo)" and "Growth (starting at $495/mo)". Re-read it before you commit a budget line.
Two details the search result answering this query states loosely. The annual discount is not "roughly 10%": $185 to $167 is 9.7% and $495 to $446 is 9.9%. And seats are not the meter. Launch and Growth include unlimited seats, the opposite of how almost every other tool your team buys is priced.
Now the four ladders. No competing page has assembled this table.
Ladder | Plans | Who publishes it | Its own date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Live | Free / Launch $185 / Growth $495 / Enterprise | | read 2026-09-27 | what a new buyer pays |
Retired | Free / Starter $149 / Explorer $349 / Pro $800 / Enterprise | joinvalley.co, warmly.ai, enginy.ai | Aug 31 2026 / Dec 10 2025 / Jan 19 2026 | superseded Mar 11 2026 |
Divergent | Free / Starter $149 / Explorer $349 / Pro $549 / Team $749 | cloudeagle.ai | Jul 10 2025 | matches neither ladder |
Divergent | "starts at $134/mo" | derrick-app.com, warmly.ai | May 17 2026 / Dec 10 2025 | the old Starter annual rate, sold as an entry price |
The retired ladder is not a rumour. Clay's own March announcement says Growth "is now available at $495/mo, $305 less than the old Pro plan." Add those two numbers and you get $800, so the vendor itself confirms the Pro price that third parties are still publishing as current.
The cloudeagle.ai ladder is the one to distrust hardest. Its date is the oldest on the first page (Jul 10 2025, eight months before the repricing), it puts Pro at $549, which is $251 below what Clay confirms, and it adds a "Team" tier at $749 that appears nowhere in Clay's own materials. Treat it as a divergent claim, not an old price. For the tool itself rather than its bill, our Clay review covers whether the product earns the spend.
Why both ladders are still true at the same time
This is the part nobody states outright, and it is why the confusion will not clear up on its own. Both ladders are real, because they belong to different customers.
Clay's March announcement says it directly: "all current Starter, Explorer, and Pro customers can remain on our legacy plans." The window to switch between those legacy tiers closed on April 10, 2026 at 11:59 PDT. Clay also runs a legacy notice on its own blog telling those customers they "can try new products through the end of the year."
So run the test on yourself. If you are buying today, Launch $185 and Growth $495 is your ladder. If you are on a grandfathered account, Starter $149, Explorer $349 and Pro $800 is still what you pay. A thread on r/gtmengineering sits at position 6, the only result that names the change in its title: "Clay Just Changed Their Entire Pricing Model. Here's My Take After 18 Months of grinding." Its snippet lists both ladders side by side without resolving which applies to whom. Thousands of people have read that. Nobody has explained it.
One more thing about the repricing, and it cuts in Clay's favour. The same announcement compares one inbound automation workflow on both models: 7.3 Data Credits on the modern plans against 20 Data Credits on legacy. The new ladder is not just different. On the credit meter it is cheaper.
What a Clay credit actually costs you
Clay runs two meters, and the distinction is the whole model. Data Credits buy data from Clay's marketplace. Actions measure the work Clay does on that data: enriching, running a table, calling a model, pushing to a third-party system, exporting. In the vendor's own words, "Clay is doing work, and Clay is buying data on your behalf."
I am not going to spend six hundred words teaching you that, because the page at position 7 already does it well. What matters for your budget is that the two meters deplete under different rules.
Rule | Data Credits | Actions |
|---|---|---|
Starting unit price | $0.05 each (vendor) | under $0.01 each (vendor) |
Rolls over? | Yes, up to 2x your monthly allocation | No. Resets every billing cycle |
Charged when a lookup misses? | No | No |
Charged if you bring your own API key? | Skipped entirely | Yes. One Action per run |
Three consequences, and each one changes a plan decision.
- The meters run out independently. A workflow pushing 1,000 records through five steps burns 5,000 Actions on platform work alone, while its credit load depends on how many lookups the waterfall hits. Launch holds 15,000 Actions, so that workflow runs three times a month before Actions run dry, whatever is left on the credit meter.
- Credits are a currency and Actions are capacity. Credits bank up to twice your allocation. Actions evaporate. A team with spiky demand is rewarded on one meter and punished on the other.
- The plan headline is a price for capacity, not for output. That is why every "how many contacts can I enrich" question has no answer until you derive a per-contact rate, and Clay does not publish one.
Where AI work lands on the Clay pricing meters
If your team reaches Clay through its AI features rather than through enrichment, one rule decides your meter split. Bringing your own API key skips the Data Credit charge entirely, and the run still costs one Action. So AI work you can bring your own key to is cheap on credits and unchanged on Actions.
Native models bill the other way. Roughly 80% of them charge a flat number of Data Credits per task, which makes them predictable to budget. The token-intensive frontier models bill variable, by token consumption, which makes them the least predictable line on the invoice. Clay puts both through the same credit meter, so a month where somebody leaves a long-context model running looks exactly like a month of heavy enrichment until you read the breakdown.
That is the practical reason to know which meter your work lands on before you pick a tier.
Running the Clay pricing calculator on your own numbers
The vendor's calculator at clay.com/pricing-calculator takes your accounts, contacts and datapoints and names a plan. Use it. Just know that its output depends on a per-contact rate the vendor never prints.
Published credit blocks, from the configurator (opened Sep 25 2026, read 2026-09-27):
Data Credits / month | Price / month | Implied unit price |
|---|---|---|
2,500 | $125 | $0.0500 |
6,000 | $290 | $0.0483 |
10,000 | $460 | $0.0460 |
20,000 | $880 | $0.0440 |
50,000 | $2,125 | $0.0425 |
Unit prices computed from the two published columns. The floor matches Clay's own "$0.05 each" statement and the decline matches its claim that credits "always get cheaper as you grow."
Once you have the blocks, the sticker decomposes. Launch at $185 is $60 of Actions (15,000) plus $125 of credits (2,500). Growth at $495 is $205 of Actions (40,000) plus $290 of credits (6,000). Notice what the $55 difference does not buy: more of either meter. It buys CRM auto-sync, the HTTP API, webhooks, web intent and priority support. If those five are not on your list, Growth is not either.
What a real team pays: three named sizes
Published pricing pages stop at the sticker. Here is the arithmetic through to an annual number, using roughly six Data Credits per enriched contact for email plus phone. That rate is a third-party derivation worked backward from Clay's own calculator, not a vendor figure. All figures below assume annual billing.
A solo operator enriching 500 contacts a month. 500 contacts at six credits each is 3,000 credits, which tips past Launch's 2,500 allocation, so you are buying the 6,000-credit block at $290. Add Launch at the annual rate of $167 and you are at $457 a month, or $5,484 a year. Actions never become the constraint at this size.
A five-person GTM team working 2,000 contacts a month. 2,000 contacts at six credits each is 12,000 credits, so you step up to the 20,000-credit block at $880. Launch annual $167 plus $880 is $1,047 a month, or $12,564 a year. Now watch the other meter. 2,000 records through five workflow steps is 10,000 Actions against Launch's 15,000, so you get one and a half runs a month. This is the size at which the second meter stops being theoretical and starts being the reason a project slips.
A 25-seat team. Start with the thing that trips people up: 25 seats cost the same as one seat, because seats are unlimited. Volume decides your bill.
Take the top published self-serve credit block: 50,000 credits at $2,125 plus Growth at the annual rate of $446. That is $2,571 a month, or $30,852 a year, for roughly 8,300 enriched contacts a month. Growth's 40,000 Actions covers 8,000 records through five steps.
That number has two independent third-party anchors to sit against.
Anchor | Figure | Published by | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
Average enterprise contract | $30,400/yr (reported deals $12,000 to $154,000) | Vendr procurement aggregates, via salesmotion.io | Aug 28 2026 |
Projected cost for a 25-user team | $75,000 to $120,000/yr | amplemarket.com, a direct Clay competitor | Apr 24 2026 |
Our arithmetic lands within about $450 of Vendr's average. That is not a coincidence. The average enterprise Clay contract looks like one Growth plan plus the top published credit block. The amplemarket figure is a different measure: a fully loaded stack projection for 25 users, published by a company selling its own roughly $80,000 alternative. Treat it as a competitor's projection, not as a Clay price.
Above 50,000 credits a month the ladder stops answering. If your 25 seats are genuinely busy, 25,000 contacts is 150,000 credits, and the same records through five steps is 125,000 Actions, which is over Growth on both meters. At that point you are not choosing a plan. You are negotiating.
The hidden-cost layer that moves the real number
Four things sit between the sticker and the invoice.
Credit top-ups. Rollover caps at twice your monthly allocation. Past that you buy blocks, and the unit price walks from $0.05 down to $0.0425 as you grow. The entry price is the worst one you will ever pay.
Action burn you cannot see. Actions do not roll over, and a five-step workflow costs five Actions per record whether or not the data came back useful. In the review corpus in our competitor research, 28% of negative Clay reviews cite the learning curve and 42% cite credit burn. The meters are published. The skill not to waste them is not.
The role the tool implies. There were 3,000+ open GTM engineer listings on LinkedIn in January 2026, up 205% year over year, and Clay announced a $1M GTM-engineer scholarship fund in the same quarter it raised a $115M Series D at a $7.1B valuation (Sep 9 2026, led by Wellington Management). I wrote about what that role does in our piece on GTM engineering. The budget point is blunt: the software is priced like software, and operating it is priced like a hire. If nobody on your team owns that job, the cheapest plan is still the expensive option.
Budget context. Clay serves 17,000+ customers and was reported at roughly $200M annualized revenue. When a vendor has that much pricing power, assume the ladder is a design decision rather than a mistake.
One more thing, and it is the part of this I keep coming back to. Clay's own pricing FAQ tells readers: "The best place to start is matching your needs to the right tier, not trying to predict your exact Data Credits or Action volumes." The same vendor says its plans are sized so "90% of customers will never hit a limit on Actions." Both statements are honest. Together they show the seam: the FAQ is answering the median customer, and that thread at position 6 was written by someone in the top decile. If you are sizing a 25-seat team, read the vendor's advice as advice for the median, not as an answer for you.
Which plan fits which job
Job | Plan the arithmetic selects | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
Prospecting list building, under 1,000 contacts/mo | Launch | credit block |
Enrichment at volume, 5,000+ contacts/mo | Growth plus a top-up block | credit block |
Signal tracking and intent data | Launch | low credit load, heavy Action load |
Agent workflows on every record | Growth or Enterprise | Actions |
AI drafting with your own API key | Launch | credits skipped, Actions only |
Multi-team rollout with CRM sync and API access | Growth | the $55 delta's features |
Read that table against what you actually bought. The mismatch I see most often is a team on Growth because it wanted 40,000 Actions, while its credit load never exceeds the 2,500 that Launch already includes. In that case the $55 delta bought CRM auto-sync and an API, which is a fair trade, and the extra 2,500 credits, which it did not need.
Where the published numbers disagree, and how to settle it
Nine of the eighteen organic results on this query publish a price. They contain four distinct ladders. Their dates run from Jul 10 2025 to Aug 31 2026, and the field is being rewritten as you read it: three new pages entered the results in the five days before this article was written (Sep 6, Sep 11 and Sep 25).
There is a commercial reason for the mess. Almost every page explaining Clay's pricing is published by a company selling a Clay alternative or a layer on top of Clay. That does not make their numbers wrong. It does mean none of them is neutral, which is why they disagree while all sounding confident.
The vendor's own surfaces disagree too. Clay's pricing FAQ says "150+ data partners." Clay's homepage, opened the same day, says "200+ vendors." Both were read on 2026-09-27. I am not going to pick one for them.
So here is the rule to use, and it is the whole reason this page exists.
clay.com/pricingandclay.com/pricing-calculatorbeat every explainer, including this one if we ever disagree with them.- Read the annual column separately from the monthly column. Most of the contradictions in this field are that one mistake.
- Check the page's own publication date. If it predates March 11 2026, its ladder is retired.
- If a ladder contains a tier name the vendor does not print (Team, for example), treat it as a divergent claim rather than a price.
Every figure here was read on 2026-09-27. If you are reading this after another repricing, re-check the vendor page first and treat our numbers as the historical record.
When a metered data tool stops making sense
The honest version is that metered pricing is not going away, so waiting for Clay to return to simple seat pricing is not a plan. 79 of the top 500 SaaS companies now use credit models, up 126% from 2024. One forecast puts 62% of AI products on usage-based pricing by 2027, and Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index records spending on AI-native software up 108% year over year. The two-meter model is where software pricing is heading. Our OpenAI API pricing covers the same metered-versus-seat tradeoff one layer down the stack.
A crossover point exists, and it is not the plan price. It is the per-result price. At the 20,000-credit block, enriched contacts cost about $30.85 per 1,000 before Actions. At the 50,000-credit block it is about $25.50. Run those against your own volume. The moment your blended cost per enriched contact passes what the same contact costs through a flat subscription, the metered model is charging you for a workflow problem rather than a data problem.
Most marketing teams never reach that line, because most do not run high-volume enrichment. The hours go into the work around the data stack instead: market research, competitor analysis, sequencing, reporting. That work is priced per platform rather than per lookup, which is a different economic shape entirely. If your Clay line is mostly orchestration, our Clay alternatives is the relevant next read. If it is mostly workflow, compare against marketing automation tools and workflow automation tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Clay cost per month?
Free, then Launch at $185/month or $167/month billed annually, then Growth at $495/month or $446/month billed annually, then Enterprise on custom terms. All four read from clay.com/pricing on 2026-09-27. If you hold a grandfathered account, your ladder is different: Starter $149, Explorer $349 and Pro $800 still apply to legacy customers who chose to stay.
Is there a free Clay plan?
Yes, and it is a real one rather than a trial. It includes 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month, with a 200-row limit per table. Clay also states the same allowance as "1,200 data credits/yr," which is 100 multiplied by 12, so the two published figures agree. At third-party estimates of two to five credits per contact, 100 credits works out to roughly 20 to 50 enriched contacts.
What is a Clay credit worth?
A Data Credit starts at $0.05 and falls to about $0.0425 at the 50,000-per-month block. An Action costs under $0.01. The meters behave differently in ways that matter more than the unit price: credits roll over up to twice your monthly allocation, and Actions do not roll over at all.
Why do different sites show different Clay prices?
Four reasons, all checkable. Three of the pages ranking on this query were written before the March 11 2026 repricing. One publishes a ladder that matches neither the old nor the new model. Two sell the retired Starter annual rate of $134/month as an entry price. And nearly all of them are published by companies selling a Clay alternative, so none of them is indifferent to the number. Check the page date first, then the vendor.
Does Clay have an enterprise tier?
Yes. Enterprise carries custom pricing with 100,000+ Data Credits and 200,000+ Actions a month. Vendr's procurement aggregates put the average enterprise Clay contract at $30,400 a year, with reported deals running from about $12,000 to $154,000, as reported by salesmotion.io on Aug 28 2026. That is procurement data rather than vendor data, and it is the closest thing to an observed price for the top of the range.
What are the best Clay alternatives?
It depends which half of Clay you are replacing. If the problem is the credit meter and the per-contact cost, you are comparing enrichment vendors, and our Clay alternatives works through that set. If the problem is that nobody on the team can operate the workflow, the alternative is not another data tool. It is moving the orchestration layer somewhere the rest of the team can reach.
Does Clay charge per user or per seat?
Neither. Launch and Growth include unlimited seats. You pay for credits and Actions, which means a 25-person team and a 2-person team pay the same for the same data volume. That is the opposite of how most GTM tools price, and it is why headcount is the wrong input for your Clay forecast. Use contacts and workflow steps instead.
What to do before your next Clay renewal
Pull your last three invoices and read them as two lines rather than one: credits consumed, and Actions consumed. When I have watched teams do this, the spend is almost always lopsided, and the plan they bought was sized for the meter that was not the problem. Then re-read clay.com/pricing on the day you do it. Clay has changed this ladder once in 2026 and nothing on the third-party layer has caught up.