Clay Pricing Explained (2026): What Two Meters Really Cost

Clay costs $0, $167 a month or $446 a month on annual billing, and the number somebody quoted you is probably none of those. I read Clay's pricing page on 29 September 2026. The two paid cards showed $167 and $446 with the annual toggle on. Clay's own FAQ, further down the same page, says $185 and $495.

Both sets are correct. Clay bills two separate meters at once, Actions and Data Credits, and each one has its own volume slider sitting on the card. The price in big type is the sum of wherever those two sliders happen to be. The toggle at the top then decides whether you are looking at the annual rate or the monthly one.

That single fact explains every disagreement you will find about what Clay costs. The roundups are not sloppy. They are reading different slider positions and calling the result "Clay's price".

I have not run outbound campaigns in Clay and I am not going to pretend otherwise. This is a pricing-structure analysis: what the two meters are, what every published step on each ladder costs, and which of them quietly takes your budget. Every figure came off clay.com/pricing on 29 September 2026 and carries that date.

It is the data-credit meter, by a distance.

How Clay's pricing actually works

Most software pricing pages sell you a tier. Clay sells you a tier and then makes you configure it, twice, before it will show you a price. That is the part nobody explains, and it is the only part that matters when you are trying to budget.

Here is the mechanism in full.

• Meter one, Actions. Sold by the year, with five published steps on Launch starting at 180,000 a year for $54 a month.
• Meter two, Data Credits. Also sold by the year, also with five published steps on Launch, starting at 30,000 a year for $113 a month.
• The card total. Whatever the two sliders say, added together. Nothing else is in the number.
• The billing toggle. Monthly, or annual at a 10% saving. It scales the total; it does not change the allowances.

Clay's pricing page does not put the two units side by side and define them. It prices them. What the page will tell you is the rate: data credits start at $0.05 each and actions start at less than $0.01 each, both getting cheaper as the volume climbs. If you want the wider view of how this unit-metering habit works across the category, AI agent pricing explained covers the model rather than the vendor.

The card price is two positions added up

Take Launch at its default. The actions slider sits on 180,000 a year, which Clay prices at $54 a month. The data-credit slider sits on 30,000 a year, priced at $113 a month. Fifty-four plus one hundred and thirteen is one hundred and sixty-seven, and $167 is the number on the card.

Growth works the same way. Its default is 480,000 actions at $185 and 72,000 data credits at $261, and $185 plus $261 is the $446 on the card.

Nobody is hiding this. It is just that the sum is the thing people quote, and the two parts are the thing people need.

The data meter carries the headline

At the Launch default the data credits cost $113 and the actions cost $54. The data meter is more than double the action meter, and it is 68% of the bill on a plan most people describe as "Clay at $167". You could double your action volume and barely notice. Nudge the data slider and the invoice moves like a lift.

The clearest way to see the gap: at that default, $113 a month buys you 2,500 data credits a month and $54 buys you 15,000 actions. Half the money, six times the units.

Growth raises the floor

Launch's action ladder begins at 180,000 a year. Growth's begins at 480,000. The same is true on the data side, where Launch starts at 30,000 credits a year and Growth starts at 72,000. Upgrading does not only raise what you are allowed to buy; it removes the cheap positions from underneath you.

So the cheapest possible Growth configuration is $185 plus $261, which is the $446 default. There is no smaller Growth.

The $167 card and the $185 FAQ are the same plan

This is the reconciliation that most Clay write-ups skip, and skipping it is why their numbers look unreliable. Clay's billing toggle offers "Annual, save 10%". The cards render the annual rate. The FAQ answers the question in monthly-billing terms. Run the discount in both directions and the two sets line up.

Card and FAQ figures as shown on Clay's pricing page on 29 September 2026. The arithmetic and the annualised totals are mine, derived from the stated 10% annual saving.

Two different pages will therefore quote you Launch at $167 and Launch at $185 and both will be telling the truth. Ask which billing cadence before you argue about it.

Clay plans at a glance

Clay figures are what clay.com/pricing showed on 29 September 2026. The annual column is the card figure with the annual toggle on; the monthly column is what Clay's own FAQ gives for monthly billing. Monthly action and data-credit volumes are Clay's published yearly allowances divided by twelve. Gravity is in private alpha.

Read that last row carefully, because the temptation with a competitor pricing post is to end it with a swap. There is no swap here. Clay finds and enriches the people; Gravity is a general agent platform for the work that happens once you already know who they are.

Price your own volume: both ladders in full

These are the published slider steps. Find your monthly volume, read across, add the two numbers, and you have the card price Clay would show you. This is the part of the page that lets you skip the sales conversation.

Slider steps as read on clay.com/pricing on 29 September 2026. The 120,000 data-credit step read $414 on Launch and $413 on Growth; every other shared step matched to the dollar. Monthly columns are the yearly figures divided by twelve.

Put the two tables next to each other and something useful falls out. The data-credit ladder is practically identical on both plans. The actions ladder is not, and the gap widens the more you buy.

• At 480,000 actions a year, Growth charges $185 where Launch charges $135. That is $50 a month more, or 37%.
• At 720,000, it is $261 against $180. Eighty-one dollars, 45%.
• At 1,200,000, $405 against $261. A gap of $144, which is 55%.
• At 2,400,000 actions a year, Growth wants $765 where Launch wants $486, a difference of $279 a month, or 57%, for an identical quantity of the same unit.

Which means the entire cost of being on Growth sits on the actions meter. Price Growth's own default bundle on Launch's sliders and it is $135 plus $261, or $396 a month. Growth charges $446. The Growth feature set, at Growth's default volume, costs you $50 a month. Six hundred dollars a year for CRM auto-sync, warehouse sync, any HTTP API, webhook signals, intent signals and priority support.

Whether that is cheap or expensive is your call, and it is a much easier call to make once it is a single number instead of a plan comparison.

What actually moves your bill

Clay's FAQ gives two unit rates: data credits start at $0.05 each and get cheaper with volume, and actions start at less than $0.01 each and get cheaper with scale inside a plan. Both statements hold up against the ladders, and checking them is worth doing because it confirms the annual discount is baked into the card figures. Here is the working, using the Launch default.

• Data credits. $113 a month is $1,356 a year for 30,000 credits. That is $0.0452 a credit on annual billing. Strip the 10% annual saving back out, 0.0452 ÷ 0.9, and you land on $0.0502. Clay says $0.05.
• Actions. $54 a month is $648 a year for 180,000 actions, which is $0.0036 each. Comfortably under the cent Clay quotes.
• The ratio. $0.0452 divided by $0.0036 is 12.6. At the Launch default a data credit costs you about twelve and a half times what an action costs.
• Volume does help. At the top of the data ladder, $1,913 a month is $22,956 a year for 600,000 credits, or $0.0383 each. At the top of the action ladder, $486 a month is $5,832 a year for 2.4 million actions, or $0.0024 each.

Now a worked example, priced the way Clay would price it.

Suppose a month of your work burns 30,000 actions and 9,000 data credits. Annualise both: 360,000 actions and 108,000 data credits. Neither has an exact step, so you buy the next one up on each slider. Actions go to the 480,000 step at $135 a month. Data credits go to the 120,000 step at $414 a month.

Your card reads $549 a month on annual billing. Of that, $414 is data, which is 75% of the bill. Against the $167 headline you started your research with, it is $382 a month more, or 3.3 times. If the same 10% discount applies in reverse, monthly billing on that configuration would be $610, though Clay only publishes monthly figures for the plan defaults, so treat that last one as my arithmetic rather than a Clay quote.

The instructive bit is which slider did the damage. Going from 15,000 actions a month to 40,000 cost $81. Going from 2,500 data credits a month to 10,000 cost $301. Eighty-one dollars bought 25,000 extra actions; three hundred and one dollars bought 7,500 extra data credits.

Budget the data meter first. The action meter mostly takes care of itself.

When Clay is worth paying for

Clay earns its price when the quality of the list is the product. If your pipeline lives or dies on whether the enrichment found the right person at the right company with a working number, you are buying research, and $167 a month is not much for research that would otherwise be somebody's job. Three situations where I would pay it without much hesitation:

• You already know your data-credit burn. If you can say "roughly 6,000 a month" with a straight face, Clay's pricing is transparent and you can cost the whole year in about ninety seconds using the ladders above.
• You need the CRM to stay in sync. Auto-sync and enrich, warehouse sync and webhook signals arrive on Growth, and at matched volume that bundle is the $50 a month calculated earlier rather than the $279 gap between the two headline prices.
• You want to test before you commit, seriously. The free plan gives 500 actions and 100 data credits a month with unlimited seats and tables, up to 200 rows per table, Claygent and bring-your-own-API-key, and the paid plans carry a 14-day trial on top. That is a real evaluation, not a demo. Our free tier comparison puts it against what other platforms hand out.

A hundred data credits a month will not run a campaign. It will absolutely tell you how many credits your campaign is going to need, which is the only number you are missing.

When Clay is not the right buy

The clearest signal that you should wait: you cannot estimate your data-credit consumption. If that is you, the $167 headline is not your price and neither is anybody else's quote. Spend a fortnight on the free plan, measure the burn, then read the ladder.

Two other cases are really category mistakes rather than budget ones.

If what you actually want is to move records between apps on a trigger, you want workflow automation and Clay is an expensive way to buy it. Zapier pricing explained and n8n pricing explained both cost that same work per unit, and the units are much cheaper. If the constraint is simply the monthly ceiling, the cheapest AI agent platforms and the best platforms under $50 are the two lists to read instead.

And if you genuinely need lead enrichment, you need an enrichment tool. Stay on Clay, start on the free plan, and if the credit price is the sticking point, Clay's bring-your-own-API-key support and multi-provider waterfalls let you route through providers you already pay for. I am not going to name a competing enrichment vendor and quote a price I did not read this week.

Where Gravity fits, and where it does not

Gravity does not enrich leads. It will not shave a dollar off your Clay bill, and any page telling you otherwise is selling you something.

What it does is the work that piles up around a campaign. It connects to HubSpot and Pipedrive, updates the records after a reply lands, writes the follow-up, and chases the ones who went quiet. That is a general agent platform doing an ordinary operations job, which is a different line item from the one Clay occupies. Plenty of teams pay for both because they are two different jobs.

The pricing, since you are on a pricing page: your first agent is free with no card. Pro is $5 a month during the alpha, with $5 of monthly usage included, and Max is $20 a month for more agents and more usage. Buy more usage from your account if you run out. Gravity is in private alpha, so the way in is an application. A run that fails on a platform error, with no usable output, is refunded under the refund policy.

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