Clay

Clay is a go-to-market data platform that combines a marketplace of 200+ data providers with AI-powered research and outreach personalization. Its core mechanic is waterfall enrichment: Clay queries providers in sequence and stops at the first verified match, which holds cost down while widening coverage. Named customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Stripe, Uber, Figma, Rippling, Notion, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Intercom, Cursor, Ramp and Vanta. Clay leads with OpenAI, Anthropic, Vanta and Ramp on its own homepage, and publishes a Figma case study on building GTM infrastructure. The vendor reported passing $100M ARR in 2025, and a January 2026 employee tender offer valued the company at $5B. Claygent is Clay's research agent. It reads a webpage and extracts the specific data points you ask for, so it can pull open roles and headcount from a careers page, or signals from a newsroom, that no pre-indexed provider holds. Sculptor turns a plain-language description of a workflow into a Clay automation. Functions provide reusable logic blocks deployable across tables, and Audiences centralizes first and third-party data sources. Clay publishes a first-party MCP server, documented on a dedicated page with its own Clay University course. External assistants including ChatGPT, Codex and Claude can call Clay Functions, reason across Audiences and return People Search results, with writes governed by rules the operations team defines. Clay writes enriched data out to Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft and Attio, alongside an HTTP API, webhook automation and Zapier and Make.com connectors. The native Sequencer runs email campaigns without leaving the platform. Pricing is public and unusually granular, and the headline figure is not the entry price. Every paid tier is a configurable ladder rather than a single rate. Launch headlines at $167 per month billed annually, and the same card states that it starts at $54 per month and expands from there. On that ladder $54 buys 180,000 actions a year, $135 buys 480,000, $180 buys 720,000, $261 buys 1.2 million and $486 buys 2.4 million. Growth headlines at $446 and starts at $185 on the same pattern. Billed monthly rather than annually, Launch is $185 and Growth is $495. Two meters run underneath all of it, Data Credits for each data lookup and Actions for platform orchestration, which is why a single unit price cannot describe what a seat costs. Failed enrichments do not consume credits, unused Data Credits roll over up to twice the monthly allocation on Launch and Growth, and bringing your own API keys skips Data Credit charges altogether. A free tier gives 100 Data Credits and 500 Actions a month with unlimited seats and tables, capped at 200 rows per table. What the entry price does not buy is worth reading before committing. CRM auto-sync, HTTP API access and webhook automation all sit on Growth rather than Launch. Data warehouse sync, SSO and RBAC are Enterprise only, and Enterprise is the one tier with no published rate. It is a custom annual commitment agreed with sales. There is no LinkedIn Ads retargeting below Growth. On assurance, Clay runs a trust portal at trust.clay.com carrying SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, CCPA, ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 42001:2023. That portal also answers the training question directly. Asked whether it will use customer data for AI training purposes, Clay answers no, on the basis that it does not make customer tables available to third parties. It states that any future change would come with an opt-out. Buyers running a data review should note two further facts Clay publishes about itself: it is a registered data broker in California, Nevada, Oregon, Texas and Vermont, and it has not appointed a Data Protection Officer. Clay is not the right tool for a team that wants enrichment without operations investment. Building effective waterfall tables and Claygent prompts takes real time, and the platform rewards a dedicated owner. For single-source verified contact data at predictable per-lead pricing, Apollo.io (from $49/mo billed annually) offers a managed database. For outreach sequencing without an enrichment layer, Instantly.ai (from $37.60/mo billed annually) handles personalized campaigns. For general workflow automation on remote infrastructure, Zapier (from $19.99/mo billed annually) and Make.com (from $9/mo billed annually) are the alternatives. Teams that want an AI agent to call enrichment and other data providers directly, per call from an MCP client or a terminal rather than in a table, can use treg.to. Data freshness depends on the underlying providers rather than on Clay, and phone number coverage in particular is inconsistent across the marketplace. Current state Q3 2026: Clay publishes a first-party MCP server reachable from ChatGPT, Codex and Claude. Audiences, Functions and Sculptor are live. Model selection spans Claude and GPT families with AI pricing that varies with actual token consumption. Its independent review corpus is strong on G2 and materially weaker on Trustpilot, where the smaller sample centers on credit-consumption visibility and support response times, and a buyer weighing the two should read both.