Clay credits explained: data credits vs actions, prices and rollover (October 2026)

Clay charges with two meters: data credits, which pay for marketplace data and AI and start at $0.05 each, and actions, which count the platform work Clay does and reset every billing cycle.

This guide uses Clay's pricing page, FAQ, docs and March 2026 pricing announcement, all read on October 17, 2026. Where those pages disagree, we show both versions, and our own arithmetic is labeled. FoxKnock sells a competing product, so weigh the last section accordingly. Confirm prices on the day you buy.

Clay data credits vs actions at a glance

Source: Clay's actions and data credits doc.

Clay pricing 2026: plans and prices

Each paid price is two sliders added together, one for actions and one for data credits. This is what Clay's pricing page showed on October 17, 2026.

Enterprise is custom with an annual commitment, and its figures come from Clay's pricing FAQ. Seats are unlimited on every plan. Tables hold up to 200 rows on Free and 50,000 on Launch and Growth. The annual toggle says "Save 10%", and the listed prices match that within rounding.

Launch is $60 for 15,000 actions plus $125 for 2,500 credits ($185), or $54 plus $113 billed annually. Growth is $205 plus $290 ($495), or $185 plus $261 annually.

Clay Launch vs Growth

Launch adds phone enrichment, job-change, news and social signals, email campaigns and scheduled runs to Free. Growth adds CRM and data warehouse sync, HTTP API, webhooks, web intent signals, unlimited ad audiences and priority support.

The sliders price that step. At 40,000 actions, Launch lists $150 and Growth $205, while credits cost the same on both. So 40,000 actions plus 6,000 credits is $440 on Launch against $495 on Growth: about $55 a month for the Growth features (our arithmetic, monthly billing).

What counts as a Clay action

Per Clay's documentation, these each use one action: an enrichment from any provider (even with your own API key), an AI run, a signal, a CRM or data warehouse sync, an HTTP API call, an ad audience export, and each lead added to a Sequencer campaign.

These use none: sourcing lists, imports from a CRM, warehouse or webhook, formulas, filters, CSV export, and moving rows between tables.

Clay puts an action well under a cent. On Launch's slider it works out to about 0.4 cent ($60 divided by 15,000, our arithmetic). Actions reset every cycle and cannot be topped up, so the only way to get more is a higher action tier.

Per Clay's FAQ, an enrichment that returns no data, or an API call that errors, uses neither actions nor data credits. In a waterfall, each step that returns data and each validation step does use them, and charges stop once validated data comes back.

What a Clay data credit costs

A data credit pays for data or AI that Clay buys from its marketplace of 150+ providers. Clay says credits start at $0.05 each and get cheaper at higher tiers. On Launch's monthly slider, 2,500 credits cost $125 ($0.050 each), 10,000 cost $460 ($0.046) and 50,000 cost $2,125 ($0.0425), by our division.

Clay's pricing page and docs list no per-enrichment price table. The product shows each cost before you run, and the docs suggest testing on 10 to 50 records first. Clay's own usage calculator recommends a plan from your inputs but shows no rate card, and we did not verify outside reports of its assumptions. What Clay does publish:

Every enrichment also uses one action. The docs call emails cheap and phone numbers expensive but give no phone figure. At $0.05 a credit, 6 to 20 credits is $0.30 to $1.00 per full record, so Launch's 2,500 credits cover roughly 125 to 415 of them a month (our arithmetic), whatever the 15,000 actions allow.

With your own provider key the credit cost disappears but the action does not. Clay's repricing FAQ says this orchestration was effectively free before and now carries a very small per-record cost.

Clay credits rollover: what carries over and the caps

• Actions: never roll over.
• Data credits, monthly plans: unused credits accumulate up to twice the monthly amount, per Clay's FAQ and docs. That is a ceiling of 5,000 on Launch's entry tier and 12,000 on Growth's.
• Data credits, annual plans: per the docs, up to 15% of the annual amount carries over if you renew at the same or a higher tier. That is 4,500 on Launch's entry tier and 10,800 on Growth's (our arithmetic).
• Free: not included, per the pricing table. Enterprise: custom.

The cap bites. A monthly Launch team that uses nothing for three months holds 2,500 credits, then 5,000, then 5,000, so a month of credits (about $125 at slider prices) is lost.

A mid-cycle upgrade to a higher-priced paid plan does not roll balances. Clay credits the unused amounts against the upgrade invoice and resets you to the new plan's allowance. After a downgrade, any balance above the new cap is trimmed once the billing cycle ends.

Clay top-up credits: price and limits

Data credits can be added mid-cycle in two ways: raise the credit slider (no premium, per the docs) or buy a one-time top-up at a 30% premium. Actions cannot be topped up.

Clay does not say what the 30% is measured against. If it applies to your plan's per-credit price, a top-up costs about $0.065 a credit at Launch's entry price, against $0.05. That is more than the $0.048 the next slider tier costs (6,000 credits for $290), by our arithmetic.

Admins on paid self-serve plans can also set automatic top-ups: a trigger of at least 15% of the plan's monthly credits, a 250-credit minimum and an optional daily spend limit. Per the docs, top-ups are subject to the rollover limit, one-time and automatic top-ups together can add up to four times the monthly allocation, and each top-up is capped at $1,000 and $5,000 across any rolling 7 days.

A worked example: 400 contacts a month on Launch

An illustration with a made-up team: two people on Launch, monthly billing, enriching 400 new contacts a month. Per contact: a LinkedIn profile enrichment, a work email find, validation with a free validator, one AI web research question on Helium, and an export to a sequencer. Assume every lookup finds something. Credit costs follow the examples in Clay's docs and vary by provider.

That is 2 data credits (0.5 + 0.5 + 0 + 1 + 0) and 5 actions per contact, so 800 credits and 2,000 actions for 400 contacts. Launch includes 2,500 credits and 15,000 actions, so the team uses 32% and 13%. At slider prices that is about $40 of credits and $8 of actions: roughly $48 of a $185 bill (our arithmetic). The rest is the plan floor, paid at 400 contacts or 1,000.

The average is $0.46 per contact ($0.42 billed annually), and the 401st costs about 12 cents. The 1,700 unused credits roll over (ceiling 5,000), and the 13,000 unused actions vanish.

Now make each contact a full record with a phone number and more AI fields. At Clay's 6 to 20 credits, 400 records need 2,400 to 8,000 credits. The low end fits Launch's 2,500. The high end needs the 10,000-credit tier (or top-ups at a premium): $460 plus $60 for actions is $520 a month, about 2.8 times the entry price for the same contacts. The fields you enrich, not the contact count, set the bill.

Credit-based pricing in sales tools covers more traps like this, and cost per lead in cold email has the per-lead math.

What changed in Clay's March 2026 repricing

Clay announced the new pricing on March 11, 2026. From its announcement, FAQ and internal memo:

• Two meters. Credits became data credits, and actions were added. Clay says plans are sized so 90% of customers never hit an action limit.
• Cheaper data. Clay says its most-used enrichments now cost 50 to 90 percent fewer credits, that credits get cheaper at higher tiers, and that the top-up premium fell from 50% to 30%. Its memo says its smallest self-serve customers had paid close to 8 cents a credit.
• Fewer self-serve plans. New customers choose between Launch and Growth instead of Starter, Explorer and Pro. Growth starts at $495, against $800 for the legacy Pro plan.
• Gates moved. Web intent signals (previously Enterprise), CRM integrations (previously Pro) and HTTP API (previously Explorer) now sit in Growth.
• AI. Clay says about 80% of models cost a flat number of credits (including its own Helium, Neon and Argon). Token-heavy reasoning models bill at the provider's cost, with no markup.
• Legacy plans. Self-serve customers could stay and switch between legacy plans until April 10, 2026. Enterprise customers move at renewal or earlier. Clay says customers who mostly use their own API keys, or are on legacy Pro, may pay more.

Clay's one text example is an inbound workflow costing 7.3 data credits on modern plans against 20 on legacy plans, and its memo calls the change revenue-negative for Clay in the near term. All of this is Clay's own account.

Not verified: the before-and-after enrichment credit tables in the announcement were not in the text we could read, so we list no per-enrichment changes. We also did not check legacy Starter or Explorer prices or how customers reacted.

Where Clay's own pages disagree

Clay's pages are not fully consistent. Check these on the day you buy:

• Launch credits. The Launch card says 3K data credits a month. The slider, FAQ and docs say 2,500.
• Who gets the 15% rollover. The plan comparison lists a one-month rollover and a 15% annual rollover for Launch and Growth, and the docs give 15% to any annual plan. The rollover FAQ mentions 15% only for Enterprise and says Launch and Growth hold up to twice the monthly amount. The monthly rules fit together (one banked month plus the new month is twice the monthly amount, our reading). The annual rule does not, so get it in writing.
• Email on Free. The pricing FAQ lists Clay Sequencer under Free. The plan comparison says Free has no email campaigns.
• Top-up limits. The March announcement and the "What is changing?" FAQ say top-up limits were removed. The docs describe the caps above.
• Smaller numbers. The pricing page gives Free tables 200 rows, while a separate FAQ says trial and free accounts get 50. The pricing FAQ gives Enterprise 200,000+ actions a month, and the docs say 100,000+.
• Per-provider prices. Clay's older "What are Clay credits" FAQ lists an email at 2 credits for some providers and a mobile number at 2 to 25, depending on provider. It describes "Clay credits" rather than data credits and appears to predate the repricing, so do not use it for current costs.

How FoxKnock handles credits

FoxKnock, which publishes this guide, uses one meter. A credit is $0.01 at list price. Plans are Free with 500 one-time credits, Starter at $49 a month for 5,000 credits, Growth at $149 for 20,000 and Agency at $399 for 60,000. Credits roll over every month, failed lookups (email, phone, enrichment, research) are free, the app shows the credit price of paid actions before you run them, and a monthly spend cap stops spending.

At default credit prices (they can change), a found and verified work email is 11 credits (about 11 cents at list price) and a standard research report is 225 ($2.25). Live prices are on the pricing page.

The trade-offs are real. For raw lookups Clay can be cheaper: its docs example puts a work email at 0.5 data credit, about 2.5 cents at the entry price, plus one action. FoxKnock has no table builder, no 150+ provider marketplace and no Salesforce or data warehouse sync. Clay has all of these, with CRM and warehouse sync starting on Growth.

FoxKnock is a fixed loop from research to an approved email. By default it drafts, you approve and your mailbox sends, and credits cover research and drafting too. FoxKnock vs Clay compares the two with dated sources, and Clay alternatives covers other options.

If you want to see what a credit buys before you commit to any plan, create a free FoxKnock account. It includes 500 one-time credits and needs no card, which at default credit prices is roughly 45 found and verified work emails.