Clay pricing and alternatives: data enrichment tools compared

Starleads wrote this guide. Starleads sells business contact lists and is not one of the tools compared here. Facts about the tools come from their own websites, checked on 20 October 2026; prices change, so check before you buy.

Clay, Apify and Outscraper: the quick answer

Clay enriches a list you already have, looking up missing emails, phones and company details from many data providers. Apify runs scrapers in the cloud from a store of ready-made tools it calls Actors. Outscraper collects Google Maps listings, priced per 1,000 records. All three bill in US dollars and leave some building and cleaning to you.

Which one to pick

• Clay: sales teams that already have target accounts and want emails, phones and signals from many providers in one table.
• Apify: teams with a developer who want to run scrapers of many kinds on a schedule or through an API.
• Outscraper: a one-off pull of Google Maps listings, with no subscription.
• A ready leads database: an Indian small business that wants every business of one trade in a city or state, with mobile numbers, in Excel today.

Enrichment, scraping or a ready database: the difference

Enrichment adds missing details to records you already hold. Scraping copies what web pages show into a spreadsheet, building a list from nothing that then needs cleaning. A ready database is a list someone has already compiled and sorted, such as every dental clinic in Pune, that you can call the same day, though you don't control its exact source.

Clay vs Apify vs Outscraper compared

Prices are as shown on the tools' own pricing pages on 20 October 2026, in US dollars.

Clay: pricing, credits and waterfall enrichment

Clay works in tables: each row is a company or a person, and each column can look up data from a provider or call an AI model. "Clay AI" mostly means Claygent, Clay's AI agent with access to web research.

Clay pricing. Each plan has two allowances. Actions measure the work Clay does, such as enriching a row, running a table or exporting data. Data credits pay for the data itself, bought from Clay's marketplace of 150+ data partners.

• Free: 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, multi-provider waterfalls, up to 200 rows per table; no phone number enrichment.
• Launch: $185 a month billed monthly, with 15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits a month, or $167 a month billed annually. Adds phone number enrichment, job-change and other signals, sending emails, and up to 50,000 rows per table.
• Growth: $495 a month billed monthly, with 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits a month, or $446 a month billed annually. Adds CRM auto-sync and enrichment, HTTP API and webhook integrations, and priority support.
• Enterprise: custom pricing with an annual commitment, including Clay API access and single sign-on.

Seats are unlimited on every plan, and Launch and Growth have a 14-day trial. Data credits start at $0.05 each and actions cost less than a cent each. If an enrichment returns nothing, Clay charges neither. Unused data credits can roll over on Launch and Growth, within limits; actions don't. With your own API key for a provider, you pay that provider and Clay uses only actions.

What waterfall enrichment means. In Clay's words, a waterfall searches several tools one after another "until you find a valid match". If the first provider you set has no email for a person, the next is asked, stopping at the first good result. For work emails you start with a name and a company domain, using providers such as Hunter, Apollo, Lusha and Snov. Since an empty look-up is free, you fill more rows without paying twice.

Strengths and limits. Clay puts many providers, AI research and, on Growth, CRM sync in one place. You start from companies you upload or find through its Audiences search, and design the table yourself. The pricing page doesn't say how many credits each provider's look-up uses, so cost per found email depends on your providers. Clay states no coverage figure for Indian small businesses, many of which use Gmail rather than a company domain, so test it on 20 businesses you know. It suits SDR teams selling to companies with websites and named staff. Our email finder tools comparison covers single look-up tools.

Apify: plans, platform usage and Store Actors

Apify runs Actors, which it describes as programs that take a JSON input, run in the cloud and return structured data. Its Store lists 93,000+ of them, for maps, websites, social media and search results.

Apify pricing. Each monthly fee comes back as prepaid usage: Free is $0 with $5 of usage and no credit card; Starter is $19 a month ($17 billed annually) with $19 of usage; Scale is $199 ($179 annually) with $199; Business is $999 ($899 annually) with $999. A compute unit (1 GB of memory for an hour) costs $0.2 on Free and Starter, falling to $0.13 on Business. On paid plans, extra usage goes on the next invoice; on Free, access stops until the next month. Unused usage expires each billing cycle.

How Store Actors are paid. With pay per event, you pay a fixed price for events the developer defines, such as returning one result. With pay per usage, you pay only for the platform usage the run consumes. Both draw on your plan's prepaid usage. For example, the Google Maps Scraper Actor, maintained by Apify, is listed "from $1.50 / 1,000 scraped places", cheaper on higher plans, with paid add-ons such as contact details from websites. Apify suggests a test run to see what an Actor will cost.

Strengths and limits. The range is very wide, with scheduling, an API and a free plan. You configure and check the Actors yourself, and their prices and upkeep vary by developer. The Google Maps Scraper's own page tells users to scrape personal data only with a legitimate reason and to factor in Google's Terms of Use. Apify suits technical teams who need web data of many kinds.

Outscraper: Google Maps data per 1,000 records

Outscraper calls itself a "Business Data & Enrichment Platform" with data from Google Maps and 50+ sources. Results download as CSV, Excel, Parquet or JSON.

Outscraper pricing. There is no subscription. You pay per service, from prepaid credits that never expire or by monthly invoice to a card, and free tiers reset every 30 days.

• Google Maps Scraper: first 500 businesses free, then $3 per 1,000 records up to 100,000, and $1 per 1,000 after that.
• Emails & Contacts Scraper (emails, phones and social profiles from each business's website): first 500 free, then $3 per 1,000 domains up to 100,000.
• Email Addresses Verifier: first 25 free, then $3 per 1,000 emails up to 100,000.

It offers a full refund within 3 days if its tools fail to retrieve data. The limits come from the source: emails appear only where a business's website shows one, categories are whatever businesses chose, and de-duplication is your job. Outscraper publishes no coverage figure for India. It suits agencies doing local research who are comfortable cleaning a file.

The limits of scraping: site terms and India's data law

• The source site's terms. Google's and Justdial's terms restrict automated collection of their content, and a tool's own terms don't override them.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. A proprietor's name with a mobile number is personal data, and whoever decides how it is used takes on duties such as a lawful purpose, reasonable security and acting on requests to erase it. The Act excludes data a person made public themselves, but whether a given listing qualifies is a question for a lawyer.
• Outreach rules apply whatever the source. Promotional calls and SMS must follow the DND rules, WhatsApp messages from the Business Platform need the recipient's opt-in first, and email needs sender authentication. A bought list, ours included, changes none of this.

This is general information, not legal advice. Our guide to Google Maps scrapers and Justdial extractors covers the risks and the practical problems of scraped data in detail.

How to choose

1. What you start with. With a list of target companies, enrichment fills the gaps. With nothing, you need a scraper or a ready database.
2. Who you sell to. Named managers at companies with their own domain suit enrichment. Owners of shops, clinics and workshops, who mostly use a mobile and a Gmail address, are easier to reach through listings or a ready list.
3. How the bill works. Clay charges a plan with actions and credits; Apify's prepaid usage expires monthly; Outscraper charges per 1,000 records from credits that don't expire. All bill in US dollars, so the rupee cost moves with the exchange rate. Ask your CA how GST applies to a foreign software invoice.
4. Mobile numbers. For selling to Indian small businesses, the mobile matters most. Clay's phone enrichment starts on Launch; a scraper returns whatever number the listing shows, often a landline.
5. Time and skills. A Clay table or an Actor takes hours to learn, and every scraped file needs cleaning.

Where a ready leads database fits

An enrichment tool needs a list to enrich, and a scraper needs someone to run and clean it. A Starleads list starts where those tools are trying to get to: every business of one trade in a city, a state or all of India, sorted, in one Excel file. It is the fastest way to give a new telecaller 500 numbers to call this week, or to fill an empty CRM with every chemical company in Gujarat today. The catalogue holds 1,59,87,535 contacts across 201 industries and 414 cities.

Each list page shows 60 real contacts, partly masked, and the share of rows with a mobile number, an email, an address and a contact name. A city, state or specialisation list costs ₹499, and bulk data for one industry across India ₹1,999, with no GST added. To mix industries and places in one file, use the list builder. The biggest All-India lists:

• IT & Networking Professionals 7,52,053 contacts · 96% email · 99% mobile ₹1,999
• Purchase & Procurement Heads 7,19,174 contacts · 23% email · 93% mobile ₹1,999
• General & Senior Managers 3,81,933 contacts · 97% email · 97% mobile ₹1,999
• Business Owners & Proprietors 3,27,366 contacts · 2% email · 98% mobile ₹1,999
• Company Secretaries 3,21,569 contacts · 97% email · 99% mobile ₹1,999

A same-day import routine:

1. Check the free 60-contact sample against a few businesses you know.
2. Buy the list, download the Excel file, and keep the columns you need, such as Business Name, Contact Person, Mobile, Email and Locality.
3. Save it as CSV, import it into your CRM or calling tool, and assign rows to callers by locality. If you use Clay too, upload only the rows with a website and let a waterfall look for more emails.
4. Send promotional calls and SMS through the registered route, which checks the DND register, and add anyone who asks not to be contacted to your do-not-call sheet the same day.

What Starleads doesn't do. The data is compiled from business directories and similar sources, so not every row has an email or a named person, and contact details change. There is no look-up of one named executive, no CRM integration or API (you import the Excel or CSV file), and no data outside India. Orders are paid by UPI or bank transfer and confirmed by hand.

What it costs: a worked example

Take a two-person team in Ahmedabad that wants about 5,000 businesses of one trade across Gujarat. Rupee amounts are at roughly ₹88 to the dollar and move with the exchange rate.

• Outscraper: 5,000 Google Maps records, with 500 free and 4,500 at $3 per 1,000, is $13.50. Contacts from, say, 2,000 of the websites add 1,500 paid domains at $3 per 1,000, or $4.50. Total $18, about ₹1,600, plus the hours of searching and cleaning.
• Apify: Starter at $19 a month, about ₹1,700, all of it usage for Actors such as the Google Maps Scraper, listed from $1.50 per 1,000 places.
• Clay: Launch at $185 a month billed monthly, about ₹16,300, with 2,500 data credits. Clay needs the list first, so this comes on top of another route.
• Starleads: a Gujarat list for the trade at ₹499, cleaned and ready to import, with no subscription; a big All-India list is sold as bulk data at ₹1,999.

In dollars, scraping looks cheap. The real cost is the cleaning time, the risks above and the days before the first call.

Our verdict

Clay is a strong choice for teams that know their target accounts and want data from many providers in one place. Apify suits technical teams that need web data of many kinds and will configure and check scrapers. Outscraper is the simplest way to pay per record for Google Maps listings, if you will clean the file. For an Indian small business selling by phone, a ready leads database gets the team calling the same day, with enrichment added later for accounts that need a named person. Our guide on how to increase sales shows where each tool sits in a full sales system.

Questions people ask

How much does Clay cost?

Free with 500 actions and 100 data credits a month; Launch $185 a month billed monthly or $167 billed annually; Growth $495 or $446; Enterprise on request. Seats are unlimited.

What is Clay AI?

Mostly Claygent, Clay's AI agent that researches the web to fill a column. Most AI models cost a fixed number of data credits per task; token-heavy models are charged on the tokens used.

Is Outscraper free?

Partly. The first 500 Google Maps records, the first 500 website contacts and the first 25 email checks are free, and the free tiers reset every 30 days. After that you pay per 1,000 records, with no monthly fee.

What are the alternatives to Clay?

An email finder such as Hunter.io or Snov.io for single look-ups, Apify or Outscraper for scraping, and a verifier before you send (see our email verification tools comparison). For every Indian business of one trade in a place, a ready list.

What is data enrichment?

Adding missing details, such as a work email, a phone number or a company's size, to records you already hold. It improves a list; it doesn't create one.