What Clay is good at
- Pulls emails, phones and company details from 150+ data partners through one marketplace.
- Importing, formulas, filters and manual edits cost no credits, so you can shape a list cheaply before enriching it.
- Unused data credits on monthly plans roll over, up to 2x the plan's monthly amount.
Where Clay breaks
- You run out of actions mid-month: actions cannot be topped up separately, you must move to a higher plan (Clay docs).
- You need CRM sync, HTTP API calls or webhooks on a smaller plan: those are Growth and Enterprise only, and the Free plan caps tables at 200 rows (Clay pricing page).
- You want something simple: Trustpilot reviewers (3.0/5 from 26 reviews) call it hard to learn, with complaints about credit usage and slow support.
When a custom build beats Clay
When you only need one or two enrichment sources on a fixed schedule, a small script calling those provider APIs directly avoids paying for a whole orchestration layer.
Setup
Low-code. Mostly point and click. Formulas or small code steps come in once you go past the basics.
Sources
Price checked 9 Oct 2026. If something here is out of date, email indra@kratuva.com and we will fix it.