Clay alternatives: what I moved to, and the one number that decided it

Clay sells a spreadsheet that calls a hundred and fifty data providers for you. It works. I ran it, I paid for it, and on 20 September 2026 I took it off this site. I re-read both pricing pages the next morning to write this, and one of them had a trap in it. It never broke. A Clay data credit starts at 0.05 dollars and a credit on Airscale costs 0.00756 on its top published plan, and once you are enriching tens of thousands of rows a month that gap stops being a detail about pricing pages and becomes the line item you defend in a meeting.

No table of nine tools at the end. What is here instead: the two credit prices that decided the move, the 8,948 contacts that set our real mobile rate, and the one comparison I cannot honestly make for you.

The published prices, read on both pages the same morning

Clay, read 21 September 2026, and read carefully, because the page shows annual pricing by default. Free at zero for 100 data credits a month. Launch is 185 dollars a month billed monthly and 167 billed yearly, for 2,500 data credits. Growth is 495 monthly and 446 yearly, for 6,000. Enterprise is custom, with 100,000 credits and up. The headline number on each card is the sum of two sliders, actions and data credits, which is why a quick read gives you a figure that is 18 dollars off on the cheap plan and 49 off on the next one. Unused data credits accumulate, but only up to twice your monthly amount, and the actions counter resets every month without rolling over at all. Their own page puts the floor plainly: data credits start at 0.05 dollars each.

Airscale, same morning: Starter at 49 dollars a month with a credit at 0.01225, Pro at 99 with a credit at 0.00825, the 189 dollar tier at 0.00756, and a custom tier where the published rates are 0.008 dollars for a verified email and 0.15 for a mobile. Their page says credits never expire and carry into the next month, with one condition that is easy to miss: it holds as long as you are subscribed to a plan.

Now the part most comparisons skip. A credit buys whatever the vendor decides it buys this quarter, and that changes with the quarter. Comparing 0.05 against 0.00756 as if they measured the same thing is how people end up disappointed after the migration. Compare what a result costs, or admit you cannot compare. On the one unit both vendors publish in dollars rather than in credits, a verified email, Airscale prints 0.008 and Clay prints a credit floor and a marketplace where the provider sets the price. That is a real difference in how much you can know before you sign.

What I actually pay, on my own accounts

At our volume an email costs 0.007 dollars and a mobile 0.12. Those are our numbers, not a quote from a pricing page, and they are below the published custom tier because volume moves the rate. Take them as what a prospecting agency running full time gets to, not as what you will see in month one.

The other number worth having is the one nobody prints. On 8,948 French decision-makers pushed through our chain in August 2026, 1,798 came back with a mobile. Twenty percent. That is the whole waterfall and not one provider, and it is the honest ceiling on European mobile data from anyone. Any vendor promising you materially more than that on decision-makers in Europe is selling you a number, not a contact.

Where the money actually leaks, and it is not the subscription

On our own account, a search bills 0.1 credit per row returned, whether you keep the row or not. On one extraction, four of our searches returned 23,089 rows that resolved to 15,363 distinct people. A third of that spend was overlap, because the searches were ordered by how they came to mind instead of from narrowest to widest. Deduplicating afterwards refunds nothing. You paid at the moment the row came back.

The fix costs nothing and almost nobody does it: count first with the free count call, order your searches from narrowest to widest, then delete the ones a broader search already covers. We wrote the full method in count before you buy the list, and it applies whatever tool you end up in.

What Clay does better, and you should know it before you move

Clay contains a waterfall, but what it sells is orchestration. Judge it as an expensive waterfall and you miss what the subscription actually buys. If your work is orchestration, if you want to chain an AI agent onto a column, branch on a condition, call your own API in the middle of a table and hand the result to a sequencer, Clay is built for that and Airscale is not. Their marketplace is also wider: the pricing page advertises 150 or more providers against 30 or more.

So the move only makes sense if what you are buying is coverage per dollar on a repeatable list, at volume, every week, which is what the credit tiers on the Airscale page are built for. That is our job. If your job is building one clever workflow a month for a client, 185 dollars is not the expensive part of your stack and you should keep it.

The other two names people arrive with

If you want a specialist rather than a pool, the honest comparison inside our own chain is Prospeo against Icypeas, where we publish what each returns on the same list. The Prospeo pricing page bills 10 credits for a mobile and 1 for an email, charged only on a result, which is a cleaner model to reason about than a balance when your volume is small. Icypeas we use as a verifier before send rather than as a finder.

And if you are still deciding whether you need a pool at all, how a waterfall actually works is the piece that explains why one provider is never enough, without the vendor framing.

The short version

Volume decides this, not quality. At a few hundred enrichments a month the subscription gap is noise and the orchestration earns its price. At our volume the credit rate is the whole argument, which is why the Airscale tool page is the one I point people at now. Read it for what it costs, and for the two failure modes that cost us a third of a run before we understood them.