Disclosure first: I work at treg.to, a pay-per-call enrichment API that resells provider lookups at list price. That's the only time the name appears here. I have a horse in this race.
Most people I know who left Clay left over what a credit costs against what the provider charges for the same lookup. So I ran one list both ways on the same afternoon.
292 people at 88 companies, name and domain in, work email out. Built from public team pages so every answer could be graded against the address the company itself publishes.
Clay, stock Work Email waterfall: 262 exact matches, 0.71 credits a row. On Launch ($185 a month for 2,500 credits, pricing page 18 Sep) that's $0.074 a credit, about $0.052 a row, $0.058 per correct address.
Our side, same lookups at the provider's own per-lookup price: 264 exact, $0.005 a row. Add a verify pass, because Clay does that inside the waterfall and we don't, and it's $0.0066. So 8x, not the 10x the finding-only number says.
Before you take that: ours was also the least precise thing I ran, 5 answers on the wrong domain against Clay's 4, Kitt flagged 16 of ours invalid against 11 of Clay's, and 3 rows died on a bug in our router. Clay's credits per found address have also been a different number on every list I've run, 0.60 to 1.03, so I can't quote a job before it runs.
Three things got worse when I switched. Verify is a second call, forget it and you ship unverified. You pay from a prepaid balance, not an invoice, and an empty balance returns a 402 until someone tops up. And signals, job changes, hiring spikes, that table: nothing on our side replaces it.
If you're doing this math, get the per-lookup price first, then decide if the orchestration is worth paying for on its own. For some of you it is.
https://i.redd.it/09v5bkofpvqh1.jpeg
Source: r/Coldemailing · by /u/s5m8x