Clay alternatives: what I use instead.

Clay is a spreadsheet that calls data providers for you. It's good at that. It's also $167 a month before you've found anything your competitors can't, because the providers it calls sell the same data to everyone.

Here's what I use instead, what each one costs, and when Clay is still the right call.

What Clay does and what it costs

You load companies or people into a table. Clay runs each row through data providers until one of them returns an email, a phone number, or a company fact. It also has an AI agent, Claygent, that can research the web for you.

Pricing, from clay.com as of September 2026:

• Free: 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, up to 200 rows per table.
• Launch: $167 a month on monthly billing, starting at 15,000 actions a month.
• Growth: $446 a month, starting at 40,000 actions a month. CRM sync lives here.

That's fair for what it is. But if your list is 12,000 rows, the free plan is done at row 200.

The alternatives

1. Claude Code, build it yourself

Best for: lists nobody sells. Cost: comes with a paid Claude plan.

Instead of renting a table, you describe the list and Claude Code writes and runs the scripts. Free sources first, paid only where you have to.

I used it to map every golf course in the US. 12,339 courses, 9,101 websites, and the booking software for 3,044 of them. Nothing in that list came from a data vendor. The booking software column is the part no provider had, and it's the part that decides the pitch.

The trade: you own the scripts. When a site changes, the scraper breaks and you ask Claude to fix it. Here's how the scraping works.

2. Apify

Best for: scraping a known site without building a scraper. Cost: free plan with $5 of usage a month, paid from $19.

Apify is a marketplace of ready-made scrapers. Google Maps, directories, social sites. Pick one, give it a search, get a table back. Claude Code can call it for you, so it slots into the build-it-yourself setup as one step. More on Apify.

3. Hunter and Bouncer

Best for: work emails. Cost: Hunter has 25 free searches a month. Bouncer verifies an address for about half a cent.

This is the email part of a Clay waterfall, bought directly. Hunter finds a company's email pattern. Bouncer checks the address is real before you send. You pay per result, not per seat.

4. Serper

Best for: Google results as data. Cost: 2,500 free searches to start.

A lot of enrichment is really "Google it and grab the first real result." Serper gives you actual Google results through an API. It found 2,401 golf course websites in one pass.

5. BuiltWith

Best for: web-stack technographics. Cost: single lookups free, lists from $295 a month.

If the question is "which companies use this software," BuiltWith is the known answer for web tech. For niche vertical software, you can read it off the sites yourself. Here's how.

6. Apollo

Best for: a big contact database you can search today.

It's what most teams compare Clay against. Fast to start. Same catch as any database, though. Everyone else is searching it too.

When Clay is still the right call

If nobody on your team will ever open a terminal, Clay's interface is worth paying for. Same if a lot of people share the same tables, or you want enrichment syncing into your CRM without anyone maintaining it.

If you want a list your competitors can't pull from the same providers, build it. That's the whole point of this site. See the golf market map for what that looks like.