Clay Pricing Explained: Is the Waterfall Worth It?

Clay's pricing starts at $149/month. That number is easy to find on their website. What's harder to figure out is what you'll actually spend once credits, waterfall enrichment, and per-provider costs stack up. The published plan price is the platform fee. The real cost sits on top of it.

This is a full breakdown of Clay's pricing tiers, how credits work, what waterfall enrichment actually costs per record, and when Clay makes financial sense compared to Apollo.io and ZoomInfo.

Clay's Published Pricing Tiers

Clay offers five tiers. Each one includes a monthly credit allotment that determines how many enrichment actions you can run before overages kick in.

Plan	Price	What You Get
Free	$0/month	Limited features, small credit allotment. Good for testing the interface and building a few sample workflows.
Starter	$149/month	Basic waterfall enrichment, limited monthly credits. Access to core data providers. Suitable for small teams running low-volume prospecting.
Explorer	$349/month	More monthly credits, access to additional providers. Better for teams enriching hundreds of records per week.
Pro	$800/month	Full waterfall capabilities, largest credit allotment, priority support. Built for ops teams running enrichment at scale across multiple workflows.
Enterprise	Custom	Custom credit volumes, dedicated support, SSO, advanced permissions. For large organizations with high-volume, multi-team usage.

The jump from Starter to Explorer ($149 to $349) mostly buys you more credits and a wider provider set. The jump from Explorer to Pro ($349 to $800) unlocks the full waterfall and gives you enough credits to run multi-provider enrichment without constantly watching your balance. Most teams doing serious enrichment work end up on Explorer or Pro within a few months.

The Real Cost: Credits and Enrichment

Here's where Clay pricing gets confusing.

Your monthly plan fee ($149, $349, $800) is the platform cost. It buys you access to the software and a set number of credits. Every enrichment action you run inside Clay consumes credits. Finding an email address costs credits. Looking up a company's tech stack costs credits. Pulling a phone number costs credits. Each action has its own credit price, and different providers charge different amounts.

The credit system means your actual monthly cost depends entirely on what you're doing inside the platform. Two teams on the same $349/month Explorer plan can have wildly different total costs depending on how many records they're enriching and how many providers they're querying per record.

A rough estimate of real cost per enriched record:

• Simple enrichment (1-2 providers, email only): $0.50 to $1.00 per record
• Standard enrichment (3-4 providers, email + phone + company data): $1.00 to $2.00 per record
• Deep enrichment (5+ providers, full waterfall across multiple data points): $2.00 to $3.00+ per record

These numbers depend on hit rates. If the first provider in your waterfall finds the data, you spend fewer credits. If Clay has to try four providers before getting a match, you've burned credits on three failed lookups plus the successful one. Low hit rates on your target market can push costs higher than expected.

The platform fee is predictable. The enrichment cost is variable. Budget for both.

How the Waterfall Actually Works

Waterfall enrichment is the reason Clay exists. It's the core product.

You build a sequence of data providers for each enrichment task. For example, to find a prospect's work email, you might set up a waterfall that tries Clearbit first, then Apollo, then Lusha, then Hunter.io. Clay queries the first provider. If it returns a verified email, the waterfall stops. If it doesn't, Clay moves to the next provider in the sequence. This continues until either a provider returns data or the waterfall runs out of providers to try.

The logic is simple: no single data provider has complete coverage. Clearbit might have great data on tech companies but gaps in healthcare. Apollo might nail mid-market contacts but miss enterprise. By chaining providers together, you dramatically increase your overall hit rate. Teams using waterfall enrichment regularly report 85-95% coverage on work emails, compared to 50-70% from any single provider alone.

The flexibility goes deeper than email lookups. You can build waterfalls for phone numbers, company firmographics, technographics, job changes, funding data, and dozens of other data points. You can add conditional logic: if the company has fewer than 50 employees, skip the enterprise data providers and go straight to the ones that cover SMBs. You can chain enrichment steps together so the output of one waterfall feeds into the next.

This is what makes Clay different from a traditional data vendor. You're not buying a database. You're building custom enrichment workflows across 75+ providers.

The trade-off is complexity. Someone on your team needs to understand which providers are best for which data types, how to structure waterfall sequences for optimal cost and coverage, and how to troubleshoot when hit rates drop. Clay gives you the tools. You supply the expertise.

When Clay Saves Money vs. When It Doesn't

Clay saves you money when:

• You're replacing ZoomInfo. A ZoomInfo contract runs $15,000 to $50,000+ per year. Clay at $349/month ($4,188/year) plus enrichment credits will cost less for most teams, and you get access to 75+ providers instead of one proprietary database. If your ZoomInfo renewal is coming up and you've got someone technical enough to build workflows, Clay is a real option.
• You need niche data. If your target market requires specialized providers (specific geographies, industries, or data types that ZoomInfo and Apollo don't cover well), Clay's 75+ provider marketplace lets you assemble exactly the stack you need. No single-vendor platform can match that breadth.
• You have technical resources. A RevOps or sales ops person who can build and optimize Clay workflows will get far more value per dollar than a team that just needs a simple prospecting database.

Clay costs more when:

• You're enriching at massive scale. Credits burn fast at high volume. A team enriching 50,000 records per month across deep waterfalls can easily spend $2,000 to $5,000 in credits alone, on top of the platform fee. At that volume, the per-record math starts looking less favorable.
• You don't need multi-provider coverage. If Apollo's built-in data is good enough for your market, paying $49/user/month for Apollo is far cheaper than $149+/month for Clay plus credits. Not every team needs 75+ providers.
• Nobody can build the workflows. Clay sitting unused or poorly configured costs money and produces nothing. The learning curve is real. If your team doesn't have someone who'll invest the hours to learn the platform, the credits pile up as wasted spend.

Clay vs. Apollo vs. ZoomInfo

These three tools get compared constantly. They solve overlapping problems in different ways.

Feature	Clay	Apollo.io	ZoomInfo
Price	$149-$800+/mo	Free tier, paid from $49/user/mo	$15K-$50K+/year
Data Source	75+ providers via waterfall	Built-in proprietary database	Largest proprietary database
Best For	Teams wanting max coverage and flexibility	SMB/mid-market all-in-one prospecting	Enterprise with budget for intent data
Data Coverage	Highest (multi-provider)	Good, varies by segment	Excellent single-source
Ease of Use	Complex, learning curve	Easy, intuitive UI	Moderate
Built-in Engagement	Limited	Email sequences, dialer	Some (primarily data platform)
Intent Data	Available via providers	Basic	Strong native intent signals

When each one makes sense

Clay is for sophisticated RevOps teams that want to own their enrichment stack. You've got someone who can build workflows, you care about data coverage across multiple providers, and you're willing to invest setup time for long-term flexibility. Clay wins on data coverage. It gives you more providers and more control than either alternative.

Apollo is for SMB and mid-market teams that need prospecting, enrichment, and outreach in one platform. The free tier is genuinely useful. The paid plans at $49/user/month deliver solid data plus email sequencing and a dialer. Apollo wins on ease of use and value. You can be productive in it on day one.

ZoomInfo is for enterprise teams with budget and a need for intent data. The database is the largest single-source contact and company dataset in the market. Intent signals are strong. The price is aggressive, $15,000 to $50,000+ per year, and the sales team will push hard for multi-year contracts. ZoomInfo wins on database size and intent data. It loses on flexibility and cost.

In our dataset of 1,298 executive sales postings, ZoomInfo appears in just 5 listings. That's a notable data point. The tool has deep market penetration at the enterprise level, but it shows up less frequently in job posting requirements than you might expect.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions

Four costs that don't appear on Clay's pricing page.

Implementation time. Getting Clay set up properly takes 20 to 40 hours for a competent ops person. Building your first waterfall workflows, testing provider sequences, optimizing for your specific market, connecting to your CRM. This isn't plug and play. Every hour your ops person spends learning Clay is an hour they're not spending on other projects.

Workflow maintenance. Providers change their APIs. Data quality fluctuates. Hit rates shift. The waterfall you built three months ago might need re-ordering because Provider A's coverage in your target segment dropped. Clay workflows aren't set-and-forget. Budget a few hours per week for ongoing maintenance and optimization.

Credit overages. Your monthly plan includes a credit allotment. If you blow through it mid-month, overage credits are billed at a premium. This happens more often than teams expect, especially when someone runs a large enrichment job without checking the credit balance first. Set alerts. Monitor usage weekly.

The "one more provider" temptation. Clay's marketplace makes it easy to add another provider to your waterfall. Each addition increases coverage by a few percentage points. It also increases cost. The marginal value of going from 90% to 93% coverage rarely justifies the additional credit spend, but it's tempting because the button is right there. Discipline matters.