Clay's 2026 Pricing Overhaul, Ranked: What It Does to Your Bill

What Clay actually changed on March 11, 2026

I'm Hlib Storchak. I build outbound systems for B2B founders and sales teams, and I've booked over 2000 meetings for B2B clients running enrichment through Clay as part of the list-building layer. Most of what follows comes from re-running client cost models after this change landed, not from reading the announcement once and moving on.

Clay collapsed its three old self-serve plans, Starter, Explorer and Pro, into two: Launch and Growth, alongside a Free tier and a custom Enterprise tier. Clay's own pricing page currently lists Launch at $185 a month billed monthly (or $167 a month billed annually) with 3,000 Data Credits and 15,000 Actions included, and Growth at $495 a month billed monthly (or $446 a month billed annually) with 6,000 Data Credits and 40,000 Actions included. The old lineup was Starter at $149, Explorer at $349 and Pro at $800, according to Cleanlist's independent March 2026 breakdown of the change.

The headline number is that marketplace data costs dropped 50 to 90%, per Clay's own pricing page. The less-publicized change is that HTTP API calls, which used to be free, now consume Actions like everything else. Both are true at once, and which one matters more to your bill depends entirely on what your Clay tables actually do.

Data Credits vs Actions, in plain terms

Before this change, one credit type covered everything: pulling a phone number, running an AI prompt, hitting a webhook. That made it hard to tell whether a big bill came from buying data or from running workflows.

Now there are two currencies. Data Credits pay for sourcing information from Clay's 150+ data partners: email addresses, phone numbers, company details, the actual enrichment lookups. Actions pay for the orchestration work around that data: enrichment steps, AI prompts, HTTP API calls, workflow triggers, CRM syncs and exports.

The changes, ranked from best to worst for your bill

Not every part of this overhaul affects you the same way. Here's how I'd rank the individual changes, from the one most likely to save you money to the one most likely to quietly inflate a bill.

1. Marketplace data cut 50 to 90%. The single best change in this update if your spend skews toward buying enrichment data rather than running custom workflows. A team spending $500 a month on data credits could see that portion drop to roughly $50 to $250 a month under the new rates, per Cleanlist's analysis.

2. Growth beats the old Pro plan on value. At $495 a month, Growth includes more credits and more actions than the old $800 Pro plan offered, which Cleanlist estimates at roughly $305 a month in savings for teams that mostly used CRM sync and enrichment features, not heavy custom integrations.

3. The top-up premium dropped from 50% to 30%. A quiet win for teams that regularly burn through their monthly allotment and buy more credits mid-cycle. It doesn't show up in the headline pricing table, but it compounds every month you go over.

4. Entry-tier pricing went up 24%. Starter's old $149 a month became Launch's $185, a real increase for the smallest accounts. It only nets out if your usage is genuinely data-heavy enough to benefit from the cheaper marketplace rates.

5. Former Explorer users often need Growth for feature parity. Explorer ran $349 a month. Some of its capabilities, including full CRM and API access, now sit on the $495 Growth tier, a roughly $146-a-month jump for teams that want the same functionality, not just the same credit volume.

6. HTTP API calls now consume Actions. The one change that can genuinely blow up a bill overnight, and only for a specific kind of workflow: heavy, custom, webhook-and-API-driven tables that used to route HTTP requests for free. Cleanlist cites one extreme case, a workflow issuing roughly 17.3 million HTTP requests a week, facing a cost increase in the range of 681%. That's a deliberately extreme example, not a typical one, but it shows the shape of the risk if your Clay usage looks like an integration platform more than a list-enrichment tool.

Who actually pays more under the new model

Two groups feel this change as a cost increase rather than a savings. The first is the smallest accounts: Starter-to-Launch and Explorer-to-Growth both moved the entry price up, and a low-volume account doesn't generate enough data-credit savings to offset that.

The second, larger group is anyone running Clay as an integration layer rather than a data-sourcing tool: tables built around custom HTTP calls to internal systems, third-party APIs beyond Clay's own data marketplace, or high-frequency webhook triggers. Those workflows used to route through Clay for free and now consume Actions on every call. If that's a meaningful share of what your tables do, the 50 to 90% marketplace discount is irrelevant to you, because you were never spending much on marketplace data in the first place.

How to model your own monthly enrichment cost

Don't compare the old and new list prices directly. They're measuring different things now. Instead, build a simple model from your own usage pattern, with every input labeled as an assumption you should replace with your real numbers, not a fact about Clay's pricing.

The formula: take contacts per month, multiply by credits per contact for your data cost, and multiply separately by actions per contact for your orchestration cost. Compare each total against your plan's included allotment. Anything under the ceiling is covered by the flat monthly price. Anything over gets billed at the top-up rate. Run it once with your own numbers and you get a range, not a single figure, which is the only honest way to price this out before you commit to a plan.

A worked example, with every assumption shown

Say you enrich 5,000 contacts a month (assumption), averaging 4 Data Credits per contact for a typical email-plus-company waterfall (assumption, within Clay's stated 2 to 8 range) and 3 Actions per contact for one enrichment step, one AI-assisted field and one CRM push (assumption).

That's 20,000 Data Credits and 15,000 Actions needed per month. On the Growth plan (6,000 credits and 40,000 actions included), your Actions usage stays fully inside the included allotment, so it costs nothing extra. Your Data Credits usage is 14,000 over the included 6,000.

The base $495 a month roughly implies an included per-credit rate near $0.08 (495 divided by 6,000). At a 30% top-up premium, the extra 14,000 credits would run in the neighborhood of $0.10 to $0.11 each, or roughly $1,400 to $1,550 for the overage. Total estimated monthly cost: somewhere around $1,900 to $2,050 for this specific volume and this specific assumption set.

Change any one input, a lower waterfall depth, a smaller list, more Actions from a heavier integration, and the number moves. That's the point: this is a shape you plug your own figures into, not a quote.

Old plans vs new plans, side by side

Check Clay's current pricing page directly before you budget off any figure here, mine included. Pricing pages change, and the exact credit allotments have already shifted slightly since the initial March announcement.

Should you switch plans right now?

If you're on the old Pro plan and mostly use enrichment, CRM sync and standard workflow features, moving to Growth is close to a straightforward upgrade: more included volume at a lower price. Run your own numbers first, but I'd expect most Pro accounts to come out ahead.

If you're on the old Explorer plan and depend on CRM or API access, price out Growth against your actual usage before assuming a smooth transition. The nominal price increase is real, and whether the extra credits and actions offset it depends on your volume, not on the sticker price alone.

If a meaningful share of your tables are HTTP-heavy custom integrations, don't switch plans yet. Pull your Actions usage history first, model the new cost against what you were paying before HTTP calls were metered, and only then decide whether to restructure the workflow, absorb the cost, or move that specific integration outside Clay.

What I tell clients running Clay today

The mistake I see most often when a pricing change like this lands is a team that reads the headline (cheaper data) and assumes their bill will drop, without checking whether their actual usage looks like the headline case. I've had a client whose Clay spend is almost entirely marketplace enrichment see a genuine, meaningful drop in their monthly bill. I've had a different client running a heavier custom-integration setup see their Actions usage push them toward the next tier, because their workflow was never really about buying data in the first place.

Same platform, same announcement, opposite outcome, because the usage pattern was different. The fix isn't reading the pricing page more carefully. It's pulling your own usage split between Data Credits and Actions before you react to the headline number either way.

What to check before your next renewal

Three things, in order. First, your Data Credits versus Actions split over the last 60 to 90 days, so you know which side of this change actually applies to your account. Second, whether any of your tables route a high volume of HTTP calls that used to be free, since that's the change most likely to surprise you on a bill rather than save you money. Third, whether your current tier still matches your usage now that the allotments and prices have moved, since a plan that was right-sized under the old system may not be right-sized under this one.

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