Clay Alternatives (2026): Verified Pricing and the Right Pick by Job

TL;DR: Clay 's 2026 pricing meters two things at once — actions and data credits — with the Launch plan starting at $167 per month billed monthly and API access gated to the $446 Growth plan (verified July 12, 2026). If you only used Clay to find emails and phones, FullEnrich is $55 per month, charged only on verified hits. If you needed a database plus sequencing, Apollo is the per-seat exit. Airscale prints the lowest per-credit price we verified. Technical teams can drop the meter entirely with n8n plus LLM APIs. The routing table below picks by the job you actually hired Clay for.

Search "clay alternatives" and most of what ranks is vendors ranking themselves: Airscale's list features Airscale, UpLead's features UpLead, and the pattern repeats down the results page (July 2026 lookups). Treat that advice accordingly. This page takes the buyer's side: Clay 's pricing page and three alternatives' pricing pages fetched directly on July 12, 2026, every other number labeled with where it came from, and a named catch for every tool.

Who is leaving Clay ? Mostly teams the credit meter was not built for. In 2026 Clay replaced its old credit plans with a dual-meter model: actions (workflow steps, "less than a cent each" per the vendor) and data credits (enrichments, from $0.05 each), metered separately. Third-party coverage dates the overhaul to March 2026 and reports it retired the old Starter, Explorer, and Pro tiers (saleshandy.com, July 2026 lookup — third-party dating, not vendor-confirmed). The recurring complaint in user reports is not the sticker price. It is the burn rate: credits spent on retries, on whole-table refreshes, and on AI-agent columns that consume 15 to 30 credits per row. If you run serious outbound volume with a dedicated builder, Clay still earns its bill — we say so plainly below . Everyone else is subsidizing that person, and this list was priced for them.

Disclosure: we have no affiliate or business tie to any vendor named here as of publication; if that changes, this line will say so. We have not run our hands-on outbound suite on these tools yet. The only hands-on testing cited on this page is Bloomberry's independent comparison (updated June 17, 2026), attributed inline everywhere we use it. Every other number is a directly fetched vendor price, a labeled vendor claim, or a labeled third-party report.

What changed at Clay's pricing in 2026

Everything below the table came off clay.com/pricing , fetched directly on July 12, 2026.

Vendor prices, verified July 12, 2026. Annual billing shows lower "starts at" figures ($54/mo Launch, $185/mo Growth) tied to lower usage tiers on the slider — treat those as entry points on a meter, not the price you will pay at your volume.

The fine print is where the leave reasons live, and all of it is printed on the vendor's page: data credits cost from $0.05 each, unused credits accumulate only up to 2x your monthly allocation, and mid-cycle top-ups on Launch and Growth carry a 30% premium. Moving your CRM sync and API access behind the $446 Growth plan is the change third-party coverage says frustrated existing builders most.

Then there is the burn rate. These figures reached us through third-party summaries of user threads (the dollar and credit figures via saleshandy.com and prospeo.io; yalc.ai aggregates the same retry-burn complaints without quantifying them — July 2026 lookups), so label them user reports, not audits: roughly $3,000 of credits burned in a first month; Claygent AI columns consuming 15–30 credits per row; 3,000 credits gone in one week on a 500-prospect list; API throughput throttled to around 400 records per hour on a 10,000-credit plan. The one first-hand, dated account we can cite directly: Bloomberry's independent tester wrote that he "burned through $700 in my first two weeks with Clay on inaccurate enrichments" ( bloomberry.com , updated June 17, 2026).

The eight alternatives at a glance

Directly verified prices fetched July 12, 2026 from clay.com, fullenrich.com, and airscale.io pricing pages. Everything else labeled inline.

The options in detail

1. Apollo.io — the all-in-one default

The job: replacing Clay when what you actually needed was a contact database plus sequencing at a per-seat price. Apollo claims 275M+ contacts (vendor claim), ships built-in email sequencing and a dialer, and its free tier is generous enough to test before paying — Apollo's own pricing-page FAQ confirms a free "Starter plan free forever," a trial with 50 credits plus 5 mobile credits, and fair-use limits on its Unlimited plans: non-paying accounts are capped at 10,000 credits per account per month, while paying accounts get the lesser of the amount paid divided by $0.025 or 1 million credits per account per year (apollo.io/pricing FAQ text, fetched July 12, 2026).

The dollar figures need a label: Apollo's plan cards are client-rendered and did not render on our fetch, so the tier prices are third-party reports, consistent across three sources (warmly.ai, phantombuster.com, salesmotion.io — July 2026): Basic $49/user/mo annual ($59 monthly), Professional $79 ($99 monthly), Organization $119 ($149 monthly, 3-seat minimum), with overage credits around $0.20 each.

The catch: Apollo is a database with workflows bolted on, not an orchestration canvas. It draws on one source — its own — so mobile numbers and European coverage are its reported weak spots (third-party tests), and credits expire monthly. Cheapest credible exit from credit anxiety; not a waterfall.

2. FullEnrich — the waterfall without the canvas

The job: if you only used Clay to find emails and phone numbers, this is the same multi-provider cascade at a flat, printed price. Verified directly on fullenrich.com/pricing , July 12, 2026: Pro is $55/mo for 1,000 credits; a free trial gives 50 credits with no card; Enterprise is custom at 60K credits/yr. The credit costs are printed on the page: work email 1 credit, personal email 3, mobile phone 10, reverse lookup 1. A 25+ source waterfall, credits roll over 3 months (12 on annual), unlimited users on every plan, and — the line that matters most against Clay — "only pay for credits when we find verified data." That is the cleanest per-credit economics we verified for this page.

The catch: it is enrichment only. No database to prospect from, no sequencer, no scraping agent, no signals — you still need a list source and a sending tool. And phones at 10 credits each mean $55 buys roughly 100 mobile numbers; phone-heavy lists get expensive fast. Worth knowing outside sales, too: recruiters run the identical waterfall pattern for candidate sourcing — our AI for recruiters hub covers that side.

3. Airscale — the budget Clay clone with printed credit math

The job: Clay 's waterfall-in-a-table pattern at the lowest per-credit price on this page. We fetched airscale.io/pricing directly on July 12, 2026: plans print at $49, $99, and $189 per month, with per-credit costs printed right on the page — $0.01225, $0.00825, and $0.00756 by tier — plus credits that never expire and roll over, and unlimited seats on every plan. Compare that to Clay 's data credits from $0.05 (and $0.065 topped up): roughly four to six times cheaper per credit, which matches what Bloomberry's independent test (June 2026) found when it named Airscale its best overall value.

The catch: a small, young vendor with no moat, and the Proxycurl precedent in the honest-negatives section below shows how quickly scraping-dependent suppliers can vanish. Our "we have not run our hands-on suite yet" caveat applies doubly here — trial it on a real list before moving your pipeline.

4. Exa Websets — prospecting as a search query

The job: list building in natural language — "Series A fintechs in Texas using Snowflake" — instead of Clay 's source-then-enrich pipeline. Exa is a search-infrastructure company, not a thin wrapper, and Bloomberry's tester (June 2026) called Websets "extremely easy to use."

Pricing carries an asterisk we will not hide: the circulating Websets figures — free tier with 1,000 credits, Core $49/mo for 8,000 credits, Pro $449/mo for 100,000, with 10 credits per verified "all-green" result — are vendor figures as surfaced through search in July 2026. Our direct July 12 fetch returned the page, but the Websets tab is client-rendered and its plan dollars were not in the HTML we could inspect; re-verify at checkout. If they hold, 10 credits per result puts Core at roughly 800 verified rows a month, about $0.06 per row.

The catch: people-search accuracy lags company search (Bloomberry's hands-on finding), and there is no sequencing or CRM-sync story comparable to Clay 's. It replaces the sourcing step brilliantly and nothing after it.

5. Persana AI — the clone that won't print a price

The job: Clay 's table-and-waterfall workflow with credit rollover and "unlimited people & company enrichments" marketing, aimed at teams that found Clay 's canvas heavy. Bloomberry's verdict (June 2026): excels at "signal-based GTM orchestration."

Here is what we can verify: we fetched persana.ai/pricing directly on July 12, 2026, and the page renders the plan structure — Monthly/Annual toggle with "save 20%," credit-rollover language — but not one dollar figure. The CTA is "Book a call." Third-party reporting (Bloomberry, June 2026) puts it at $68–$600/mo, demo required.

The catch is the opacity itself: a Clay clone that makes you book a demo to learn the price forfeits the main argument for switching. Shortlist it only if signal-based orchestration is the specific job.

6. ZoomInfo — the enterprise incumbent

The job: "good-enough data from one vendor" with procurement-grade compliance paperwork, org charts, intent data, and a named rep. When legal and security review matter more than price, this is the pick.

Pricing is quote-only. zoominfo.com/pricing returned HTTP 403 to our fetcher on July 12, 2026 — a bot wall, including with a browser user-agent, so we could not read a single figure from the vendor. Third-party reporting (Bloomberry, June 2026) puts its GTM Studio add-on at roughly $25,000 per year to start — and that sits on top of an existing ZoomInfo contract, so all-in spend starts above that figure. That is 50 to 150 times Clay 's entry cost, on annual terms.

One more thing belongs in the file, stated factually: ZoomInfo agreed to pay $29,557,612.50 to settle right-of-publicity class claims covering California, Illinois, Indiana, and Nevada — using people's names and work histories on preview pages to sell subscriptions without consent — with final approval on July 23, 2025 in the Circuit Court of DuPage County, Illinois (topclassactions.com, claimdepot.com; also disclosed in ZoomInfo's SEC 10-Q filings). If compliance is your reason for considering ZoomInfo, hand your lawyers that docket along with the SOC 2.

7. DIY: n8n + LLM APIs + an email finder — no meter at all

The job: Claygent-style AI research columns without platform markup. Clay 's own pricing page says token-heavy AI models bill "with no markup" (vendor claim, July 12, 2026) — but every orchestration step around those tokens still meters as an action. A DIY stack removes the meter entirely: n8n or Google Sheets for orchestration, an LLM API for the research and personalization columns, a per-hit email finder for the data layer. Bloomberry's estimate (June 2026) for a working stack: roughly $150–$200 per month all-in. n8n's cloud plans start around $24/mo — approximate; its pricing page is client-rendered and did not confirm on our July 12 fetch.

The LLM line item is the one we track live. Per-row research costs fractions of a cent on current budget models — our live LLM API pricing tracker has today's per-token rates, the cheapest LLM API right now ranks them by workload, and one OpenRouter key gives you every major model without separate vendor accounts. Whether you should build this at all is its own decision — our build vs buy guide for AI agents walks the trade-off honestly.

The catch: you are the RevOps person now. Provider API keys, deduplication, bounce handling, and maintenance are yours, and a broken scraper at 2am is your pager. Realistic for technical teams; a false economy for everyone else.

8. Artisan and the AI SDR category — replacing the stack, not the tool

The job: not replacing Clay but consolidating everything around it — data, enrichment, sequencing, copywriting — into one agent with one invoice. Artisan (its agent is "Ava") reportedly starts around $1,500–$2,000/mo on annual contracts with volume-based pricing; 11x has been reported at $5,000+/mo (both third-party reports — whitespacesolutions.ai, thecroreport.com, 2026 — neither vendor publishes prices).

The catch is a category-level credibility record, and it is citable: TechCrunch reported on March 24, 2025 that a16z- and Benchmark-backed 11x had been claiming customers it did not have — ZoomInfo's lawyer threatened legal action over unauthorized logo use, and roughly $3M of a claimed ~$14M ARR reportedly survived trial-period opt-outs ( TechCrunch, March 24, 2025 ); founder Hasan Sukkar then stepped down as CEO in May 2025 ( TechCrunch, May 5, 2025 ). That is one vendor, not the whole category — but it sets the diligence bar. Before signing any AI SDR annual contract: ask for reference customers you choose, not the vendor; confirm logos on the website are current paying customers in writing; and run a paid month before committing to twelve.

What a credit actually costs, vendor by vendor

The word "credit" hides a 10x price spread. Same table, printed sources:

Two honest caveats on this table. Per-credit price is not per-found-contact price — a cheap credit that returns junk costs more than an expensive one that hits, and we have not run the hands-on accuracy suite that would settle that. And Clay 's credits buy orchestration depth no one else on this table matches; you are paying for the canvas, not just the row.

Pick by situation

Where the alternatives fall short

Balance cuts both ways, so here is the against-the-grain line for every pick above. Apollo's data comes from one source — the exact problem waterfall enrichment was invented to fix — and third-party estimates put real spend at $150–$400/user/mo once overages land. FullEnrich replaces one Clay column, not Clay . Airscale and Persana are young vendors selling against a category leader: Persana without a printed price, Airscale without a track record longer than its pricing page. Exa's people-search accuracy trails its company search, per the only independent hands-on test we can cite. ZoomInfo costs 50–150x Clay 's entry price and carries a $29.55M right-of-publicity settlement in its recent record. AI SDRs inherit the 11x credibility problem until each vendor proves otherwise. And DIY means every 2am failure is yours.

One risk sits underneath every waterfall vendor on this page, Clay included: supply-chain fragility. Much of the industry's contact data ultimately traces to LinkedIn scraping, and LinkedIn has shown it will act. It sued Proxycurl — a scraping API reportedly around $10M in annual revenue — in January 2025; the case ended in a settlement with a permanent injunction and data deletion, and Proxycurl shut down in July 2025 (nubela.co's own goodbye post; startuphub.ai). When a supplier vanishes mid-contract, a waterfall routes around it — that is the architecture's strength — but pricing and coverage move with it. Ask any enrichment vendor, including Clay , how many of its providers are one lawsuit away from a shutdown notice.

We repeat the candor line because it belongs here most: we have not run our hands-on outbound suite on these tools yet. The only hands-on evidence on this page is Bloomberry's independent test, and we have labeled every number it contributed. When our own test ships, this page gets a changelog entry.

When Clay is still the right answer

Clay is the category-defining workshop tool, and nothing above fully replaces it. A 150+ provider waterfall, Claygent web research, intent signals, and a sequencer on one programmable canvas — for a team running high-volume outbound with a dedicated builder, the consensus across the user reports we reviewed is that it pays for itself, and the complaints come from everyone else.

Stay on Clay when three things hold: your volume makes the Growth plan's $446/mo base a rounding error against pipeline, someone on your team owns the credit meter as part of their actual job, and your workflows genuinely use the orchestration — signals triggering enrichment triggering sequencing — rather than a single find-the-email column. If that is you, this page is negotiating leverage, not an exit plan: the 30% top-up premium and the 2x rollover cap are terms a motivated account executive can move on an annual deal. If only one of the three holds, run the credit table above against your last three months of actual usage; that number, not this page, makes the decision.

All guides in this topic

• Live LLM API pricing tracker — the per-token rates behind the DIY stack, updated continuously
• The cheapest LLM API right now — ranked by real workload, not sticker price
• OpenRouter review — one key for every major model, and how we use its data
• Build vs buy: AI agents — the decision framework behind option 7
• AI for recruiters — the same enrichment waterfall, pointed at candidate sourcing

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