What enrichment costs, with and without a subscription
Clay bills a monthly platform fee plus credits. OpenClay bills nothing and you pay the model provider directly. Here is the arithmetic on a real workload.
Updated August 2026
Two different billing models
Clay charges a monthly platform fee, published from around $149 up to roughly $800 depending on tier, and research consumes credits from an allowance inside that plan. The cost of a row is therefore set by the platform, and running more rows eventually means moving up a tier.
OpenClay charges nothing. You supply an API key and the model provider bills you at their published rate. The cost of a row is whatever the tokens and the web search actually cost, which does not change with volume and has no floor to clear before the first row.
Clay figures are from their public pricing page and are subject to change. Check their current plans before making a decision.
What OpenClay costs at real volumes
Every figure below is generated from the live model catalog, and includes tokens, web-search fees and any free search allowance, for a four-column research job.
| Rows | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Gemini 3 Flash | Claude Sonnet 5 | Platform fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0.08 | $0.55 | $12.59 | $0.00 |
| 5,000 | $0.41 | $2.73 | $62.96 | $0.00 |
| 25,000 | $2.03 | $13.63 | $314.80 | $0.00 |
Reading the table
- The cheapest column is a genuinely capable model, not a toy. Most research rows do not need a flagship, and the five-row test tells you before you commit.
- Gemini includes a monthly allowance of free grounded searches, which is why its totals stay low at moderate volume.
- Nothing here is a subscription. Enrich a hundred rows one month and nothing the next, and you pay for a hundred rows.
When a subscription still makes sense
If you are using the parts of Clay that OpenClay does not cover, the platform fee is buying you something real: licensed contact data, waterfall fallbacks across providers, CRM sync and a support contract. Those have genuine costs behind them.
The question worth asking is which half of the product your usage actually sits in. If most of your Clay activity is research columns rather than contact lookups, that is the half you can run yourself at cost. See the Claygent comparison for the direct swap, or the full feature comparison to see where the line falls.
How to check your own numbers
- Export a representative sample of your table as CSV.
- Load it into OpenClay and describe the columns you currently generate in Clay.
- Run the five-row test. It reports an exact cost per row for your actual prompt.
- Multiply by your monthly volume and compare against what you pay today.
The estimate is measured from real token usage on your own data rather than a generic average, so the figure you get is the figure you will be billed. Full rates for every model are on the pricing page.
No account, no card, no platform fee.
Bring your own API key and pay the model provider directly.
Price your own workload