METER 1 · DATA CREDITS from ~5¢
You spend these when you buy data through Clay: someone's email, titles at a company, email validation, phone numbers, tech stack lookups, an AI agent researching the web, AI-generated content.
THE GROCERY BILL
METER 2 · ACTION CREDITS under 1¢
You spend these when Clay does something: runs an enrichment, calls an AI model, syncs a record to your CRM, exports a list, makes an API call.
THE DELIVERY FEE
✓ ALWAYS FREE — use these to shrink what you pay for
clean & normalizeformulas: clean · sort · scorededupefilter to segmentsCRM importssource companies & people from Clay's databasecross-table moves & lookupsaudience lookups & updatesmanual edits
THE GOLDEN RULE — CLAY'S OWN BILLING FAQ, VERBATIM
"You'll only be charged Data Credits when Clay successfully returns data. The same is true of Actions."
A provider searches and finds nothing? Costs you nothing. And logic is always free.
How the meters ageAction credits expire monthly. Data credits roll over, up to a cap of 2× your monthly amount, then stop accumulating.
Running outTop-ups cost a 30% premium. Buying overage every month is a planning problem, not a usage problem.
Whose key paysBuy data through Clay's marketplace. Bring your own key for intelligence: your AI account bills at cost, Clay charges just the action.
The Five Questions
Any burn, any invoice line, any "should we run this?" — a two-minute conversation.
1
Which meter did this touch?Data credits, action credits, or neither.
2
Did we pay only for successes?Anything billed on failure means something is set up wrong.
3
Could a free mechanism have done it?A formula, a filter, a lookup on data we already own.
4
Whose key paid for the intelligence?The marketplace's, or ours.
5
What does this cost at the FULL row count?Ask it BEFORE it runs. This is the question that prevents the disaster instead of explaining it afterwards.
A reasonable-looking table, multiplied by fifty thousand rows, is how budgets die. Ask these five out loud in a meeting and you're already the most dangerous person in the room about this tool.
The Plan Decode Worksheet
Exercise part two: open your own workspace's plan & usage page and fill these three blocks in. Ten minutes, and you can read any Clay bill in the room.
1 · What did we buy?
Plan name / tier
Data credits per month
Action credits per month
Rollover cap (2× monthly) hit? yes / no
2 · What did we use, and on what?
Top burn table #1 + % of total spend
Top burn table #2
Top burn table #3
Tables that never used a credit (count)
3 · What happens when we run out?
Top-ups bought in the last 3 months (at +30%)
If more than zero: which runs caused them?
Who prices a run before it fires today?