What Clay does
Clay assembles company research, enrichment and routing in tables. Its Use AI integration supports model prompts, web research and structured outputs. For our enrichment workflow, Clay coordinates the rows; Claude extracts candidate facts from supplied text. Neither role proves those facts are correct.
Choose Clay when you need to control which source runs next, retain evidence and route exceptions. Assign someone to maintain those rules. If your entire task is finding contacts and starting an email sequence, evaluate Apollo first. Paying for orchestration adds little when you have no branching process to maintain.
Pricing and the budget to measure
Clay lists Launch from $185/month and Growth from $495/month, with Free and custom Enterprise options. Confirm the selected allowance and billing term on Clay’s pricing page.
Actions and Data Credits meter platform work and marketplace data or AI separately. Your own AI key still consumes Actions; model charges move to your provider account.
Budget the selected subscription, extra usage, external provider bills and review time. Divide that total by accepted records, counting rejected rows in the cost. A table that fills more cells has not necessarily produced more usable leads. Before buying annually, run the same bounded list through your current process and compare accepted records under the same evidence rules.
Use it in the enrichment pilot
Start with the Clay and Claude workflow. Its download contains 20 synthetic records, prompts, an evidence validator and a deterministic scoring example. The offline demo makes no vendor calls and measures neither Clay coverage nor Claude accuracy.
For a live adaptation:
- Keep a stable row ID, source URL, source text and check date. Decide which fields must have evidence before running enrichment.
- Configure the model account and prompt in Use AI. Export and map the result to the bundle’s JSONL schema; a
SKILL.mdfolder is not a Clay column import. - Run the local validator, then reimport its status by row ID. Missing or unsupported evidence goes to review.
- Draft an opener only after the row passes your gate. Review the draft before export or sequence enrollment.
Our enrichment evaluation guide explains how to measure coverage, corrections and cost per accepted record. Use that measurement to decide whether another provider earns its cost.
Limits and buying checks
- Repeated work increases spend. Disable automatic reruns during setup, inspect a bounded run and set an explicit run budget before expanding the table.
- A matching quote is not proof of truth. Keep the original source and date, inspect conflicting claims, and leave missing values empty. The sample validator cannot certify a website’s accuracy.
- Connections require controls. Clay has MCP access and credit limits. Set access and budgets before exposing workflows to an assistant; one request can trigger several operations.
Read Clay vs Apollo if you are choosing a starting system. Choose Clay for a process whose source order and review gates you need to own. Keep your existing CRM workflow if it already meets those requirements at a lower measured cost.
Evidence status: this profile reviews official documentation checked on November 1, 2026. We have not run a live Clay benchmark or measured sales results. The downloadable synthetic demo is a separate local test, not a product rating.