Not a hate post - I used Clay for about 7 months and genuinely liked it. But I cancelled last month and my stack is healthier without it. That sounds odd for a tool I was happy with.
When I started, I didn't know what an enrichment waterfall was. Had no idea you could chain data providers or what a webhook did. Clay's UI made that whole world accessible: drag, test, see the logic visually. Learnt more about GTM infrastructure in that first month than in a year of reading.
But around month 6, it clicked. Every workflow I built followed the same pattern: call API → check result → call another API → push data somewhere. That's it. Clay provided a nice UI for maybe 20 lines of code or a few nodes in n8n. I was paying $495/month for that interface.
The March pricing change forced the math. They killed the Explorer tier, raised the price, and started metering every HTTP request as an action. I was effectively paying Clay to route API calls that cost nothing from any other source. And I realised: I'd learnt the patterns. I didn't need the training wheels any more.
Current stack:
- n8n for orchestration
- Limadata, PDL, Apollo for enrichment (called directly)
- Firebase for storage
Data quality is identical because Clay doesn't own any data - it calls the same providers I now call directly, with a credit layer on top.
Clay is not a bad tool. For anyone new to this world, it's probably the fastest way to learn how enrichment and orchestration work. But here's the irony: the better Clay is at teaching you those concepts, the sooner you figure out you can do it all without Clay.
