Most sales teams evaluating Clay start with the same question: "How much will this actually cost us?" The answer is more complicated than any pricing page suggests. Clay uses a credit-based model where your real spend depends on how many enrichments you run, which data providers you query, and whether your team can build and optimize workflows without burning through credits on failed lookups. According to Vendr, the median enterprise contract lands around $30,400 per year, but outliers reach $154,000 depending on usage volume and customization.
This guide breaks down every Clay pricing tier, explains how the credit system works in practice, and highlights the hidden costs that most breakdowns skip.
TL;DR: Clay's pricing ranges from free (100 credits/month) to $800+/month on Pro, with Enterprise contracts averaging $30K+/year. Credits are consumed per enrichment action, and failed lookups still cost credits. The real cost depends on workflow complexity, data provider mix, and whether your team has the technical resources to build and maintain Clay workflows.
Key Takeaways
- Clay charges by credits, not seats. All plans include unlimited users, but credit consumption scales fast with multi-step enrichment workflows.
- The Pro plan ($720/month annual) is the minimum tier with CRM integrations, meaning Starter and Explorer users need workarounds for Salesforce and HubSpot sync.
- Credit rollover is capped at 2x your monthly allocation. If you don't use credits consistently, you lose them.
- Top-up credits carry a 50% markup over your plan rate, which can spike costs during high-volume months.
- Annual billing saves 10% and delivers credits upfront, but locks you into a 12-month commitment before you know your actual usage patterns.
- For teams that want account intelligence without building and maintaining DIY workflows, finished platforms offer a faster path to value at predictable cost.
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Clay Plans Overview
Here is how Clay's four paid tiers compare at a glance:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Annual Price (per month) | Credits/Month | Annual Cost | CRM Integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 100 | $0 | No |
| Starter | $149 | $134 | 2,000-3,000 | $1,608-$1,608 | No |
| Explorer | $349 | $314 | 10,000-20,000 | $3,768-$3,768 | No |
| Pro | $800 | $720 | 50,000-150,000 | $8,640-$8,640 | Yes |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | ~$30K+ median | Yes |
All plans include unlimited users. Pricing is entirely credit-based, so team size does not affect your subscription cost. The real variable is how many enrichment actions your workflows consume each month.
“The moment we turned on Salesmotion, it became essential. No more hours on LinkedIn or Google to figure out who we're talking to. It's just there, served up to you, so it's always 'go time.'”
Adam Wainwright
Head of Revenue, Cacheflow
Free Plan: Good for Testing, Not for Selling
Clay's free tier gives you 100 credits per month (1,200 per year) with access to 100+ data providers. That sounds generous until you realize that a single lead enrichment workflow can consume 10-25 credits per record. Enrich 10 contacts with email, phone, and company data, and you have used your entire monthly allocation.
The free plan also excludes phone number enrichment entirely. For sales teams, that is a dealbreaker. Phone numbers are one of the highest-value data points for outbound, and Clay locks them behind paid tiers.
Where the free plan works: testing Clay's interface, building a proof-of-concept table, or evaluating whether the column-based workflow builder fits your team's technical comfort level. Where it falls short: any real prospecting or enrichment volume.
Starter Plan: Entry-Level with Limitations
At $149/month ($134 annual), the Starter plan provides 2,000-3,000 credits per month. You unlock phone number enrichments and the ability to use your own API keys for third-party data providers.
The critical gap: no CRM integration. Starter users cannot sync data directly to Salesforce, HubSpot, or other CRMs. That means manual exports, CSV uploads, or building custom integrations through third-party tools like Zapier. For any team running a CRM-centric sales process, this adds friction and maintenance overhead.
At the Starter tier, your cost per 1,000 credits is roughly $75. For context, enriching a single contact with email verification, company data, and a phone number can consume 15-30 credits depending on providers. That means your 2,000 monthly credits cover approximately 65-130 fully enriched contacts. Teams running outbound campaigns of any meaningful scale will hit that ceiling fast.
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Explorer Plan: The Mid-Market Sweet Spot
The Explorer plan starts at $349/month ($314 annual) with 10,000-20,000 credits per month. You gain access to HTTP API integrations, webhooks as a data source, and email sequencing integrations with tools like Outreach and Salesloft.
Still no CRM integration. This is the plan's biggest limitation for sales-led organizations. You get more credits and more workflow flexibility, but your enriched data still lives in Clay tables rather than flowing automatically into your CRM.
Annual costs range from $3,768 to $3,768 per year depending on the credit tier selected within the Explorer plan. For teams that need 10,000+ credits monthly but want to avoid the Pro plan's price tag, Explorer represents a reasonable middle ground. Just budget for the manual CRM sync overhead.
Pro Plan: Where Clay Gets Serious (and Expensive)
The Pro plan starts at $720/month (annual) and is the first tier with native CRM integrations. If your sales process runs through Salesforce or HubSpot, this is your minimum viable plan.
Credit allocations range from 50,000 to 150,000 per month, which translates to annual costs of $8,640 at the base tier up to $21,600+ for the highest credit package. The cost per 1,000 credits drops to roughly $16 at the top tier, a significant improvement over Starter's $75.
Pro is where Clay becomes genuinely powerful. The combination of high credit volume, CRM sync, and full API access lets technical teams build sophisticated enrichment and prospecting workflows. But "technical teams" is the operative phrase. You need someone who understands Clay's column-based architecture, can troubleshoot failed enrichments, and can optimize credit consumption across multi-step workflows.
Enterprise Plan: Custom Everything
Clay's Enterprise plan offers custom credit allocations, unlimited table rows, up to 40 action columns per table, SSO, Snowflake integration, dedicated Slack support, and AI prompting assistance.
According to Vendr's marketplace data, the median Enterprise contract is $30,400/year based on 19 reported purchases. The highest reported contract reached $154,000/year. Pricing depends on credit volume, support level, and any custom integrations.
Enterprise makes sense for large RevOps teams running Clay as core infrastructure across multiple business units. For most mid-market sales teams, the Pro plan covers the essentials.
How Clay's Credit System Actually Works
Clay's entire pricing model revolves around credits. Every enrichment action, AI query, and data lookup consumes credits. Here is what that looks like in practice:
Basic actions (1-5 credits): Email verification, company firmographic lookups, basic data formatting.
Medium actions (5-15 credits): LinkedIn profile enrichment, email finding through waterfall providers, company technographic data.
Expensive actions (15-25+ credits): Mobile phone number enrichment, Claygent AI research queries, multi-provider waterfall lookups.
The math compounds quickly. A typical lead enrichment workflow that finds an email, verifies it, pulls company data, and finds a phone number can consume 25-50 credits per contact. On the Starter plan (2,000 credits/month), that covers 40-80 contacts. On Pro (50,000 credits/month), you get 1,000-2,000 fully enriched contacts.
One detail that catches teams off guard: failed lookups still consume credits. If Clay queries a data provider and returns no result, you are still charged. High-volume teams running waterfall enrichment across multiple providers can burn 20-30% of their credits on lookups that return nothing.
Hidden Costs and the Top-Up Trap
Clay's published pricing tells half the story. Here are the costs that surface after you start using the platform:
Top-up markup. When you exhaust monthly credits mid-cycle, Clay offers top-ups at a 50% premium over your plan's per-credit rate. On the Pro plan, where 1,000 credits cost roughly $16, top-ups run $24 per 1,000 credits. During a high-volume prospecting push, this adds up quickly.
Rollover cap. Unused credits roll over to the next month, but only up to 2x your monthly allocation. On Explorer with 10,000 credits/month, you can accumulate a maximum of 20,000 credits. If you have a quiet month followed by a busy quarter, that cap limits your flexibility.
Workflow building time. Clay is a workflow builder, not a finished product. Someone on your team needs to design tables, configure enrichment columns, troubleshoot failed actions, and optimize credit usage. For teams without a RevOps engineer or a technically fluent sales ops person, this represents a real labor cost. According to Clay community forums, onboarding typically takes several weeks before teams build confidence with the platform.
Third-party tool costs. Clay does not handle outbound email, phone dialing, or meeting scheduling. You need separate tools for outreach execution, which means additional subscriptions to platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo for email sequencing.
Data provider API keys. While Clay connects to 100+ providers, some premium data sources require you to bring your own API keys with separate billing. This is not included in your Clay subscription.
Clay vs. Finished Platforms: The Build vs. Buy Decision
Clay is fundamentally a workflow builder. It gives you the components to construct your own sales intelligence system from data providers, AI agents, and enrichment steps. The flexibility is real, but so is the assembly required.
Finished account intelligence platforms take a different approach. Instead of giving you raw building blocks, they deliver ready-to-use research, signals, and insights without requiring your team to build or maintain workflows.
The trade-off breaks down along three dimensions:
Time to value. Clay requires workflow design, testing, and optimization before you see results. Teams typically need 2-4 weeks to build functional enrichment pipelines. Finished platforms deliver value on day one because the intelligence layer is already built.
Ongoing maintenance. Clay workflows need regular attention. Data providers change APIs, enrichment columns break, and credit optimization requires monitoring. A finished platform handles this behind the scenes.
Total cost of ownership. Clay's subscription price is only part of the equation. Add the cost of a RevOps engineer's time to build and maintain workflows, the third-party tools needed for outreach, and the credit overages from failed lookups. For context, Salesmotion offers flexible account-based pricing starting at $85/month with unlimited users on team plans, includes CRM integration, and requires no workflow building. Pricing scales by accounts monitored rather than headcount, making it far more cost-effective than per-seat models. Teams get continuous account intelligence and buying signals without the DIY tax.
Who should choose Clay: RevOps teams with engineering resources who want maximum flexibility over their data workflows and are comfortable with ongoing platform maintenance.
Who should choose a finished platform: Sales teams that want intelligence delivered ready to use, without dedicating headcount to building and maintaining enrichment workflows.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Clay actually cost per year?
Annual costs range from $0 on the free plan to $8,640+ on the Pro plan. Enterprise contracts average $30,400 per year according to Vendr, with the highest reported deal at $154,000. Your actual spend depends on which credit tier you choose and whether you need top-ups during high-volume months.
Does Clay charge per user or per seat?
No. All Clay plans include unlimited users. Pricing is based entirely on credit consumption, not team size. This makes Clay cost-effective for large teams with moderate credit needs, but expensive for small teams with heavy enrichment volume.
What happens when you run out of Clay credits?
You can purchase top-up credits at a 50% markup over your plan's standard rate. Unused credits roll over monthly, but the rollover cap is 2x your monthly allocation. If you consistently exceed your credit budget, upgrading to a higher plan tier usually costs less than buying top-ups repeatedly.
Is Clay worth it for small sales teams?
It depends on technical resources. Clay's credit costs are reasonable on higher-tier plans, but small teams often lack the RevOps expertise to build and maintain workflows efficiently. The learning curve is steep, and credits spent on workflow testing and failed enrichments add up. Small teams may get more value from a finished platform that delivers intelligence without the assembly required.
How does Clay compare to all-in-one sales intelligence tools?
Clay offers more customization than most all-in-one platforms, but requires significantly more setup and maintenance. Traditional sales intelligence tools provide a complete experience out of the box, including CRM integration, signal monitoring, and prospecting. Clay excels as a data enrichment engine for technically sophisticated teams. The choice depends on whether your organization values flexibility (Clay) or speed to value (finished platforms). See our full Clay alternatives breakdown for a detailed comparison.
