Clay Review

Clay (clay.com) is a go-to-market data platform that builds prospect lists inside spreadsheet-style tables and enriches every row by querying third-party data providers in sequence. Clay owns no contact database of its own: it resells access to more than 200 data and AI vendors, including email finders like Hunter, firmographic providers like Clearbit, and contact databases like ZoomInfo, then pushes the verified result into a CRM or email sequencer.

The core mechanic is waterfall enrichment, which falls through providers one after another and stops at the first match, lifting coverage above what any single vendor can return. Claygent, Clay’s AI research agent, sits on top of the waterfall and reads the open web, company sites, and LinkedIn profiles to fill in custom data points that no provider sells as a standard field. Both are available on every plan, including the free tier.

How does Clay’s data credits and actions billing work?

Clay bills in two currencies: data credits, spent only when a provider returns a match, and actions, spent every time a step runs whether or not it finds anyone. A five-provider waterfall over 1,000 contacts burns 5,000 actions regardless of hit rate, which makes the real cost of a deep waterfall hard to predict from the sticker price alone. Clay prices every plan per workspace with unlimited seats, so a subscription buys a credit and action allowance rather than a headcount license.

Clay is a private, venture-backed New York company, and it reports more than 10,000 customers including OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic, and Rippling. It holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification and states GDPR and CCPA compliance for the platform itself, though the lawful basis for contacting any enriched record still sits with the buyer, since compliance follows whichever third-party providers are switched on inside a given waterfall.