# Cutting Clay costs: when an AI assistant and a spreadsheet can do your account research

> For teams paying for Clay mainly to research target accounts: how to check tier fit, and when an AI assistant plus Google Sheets can replace the research part.

Updated 2026-10-13 · https://onelesstool.com/guides/replace-clay-prospect-research

**Typical savings:** on the Launch tier ($167/month billed annually), moving account research to an AI assistant you already pay for saves up to $167/month. At the top end, replacing the research part of a Growth plan saves up to $446/month.

Clay bills by actions and data credits. Launch is $167/month (15,000 actions, 2,500 data credits) and Growth is $446/month (40,000 actions, 6,000 data credits), both billed annually. Monthly billing costs $185 and $495. If most of what you use Clay for is account research rather than contact data, you may be paying for more than you need. In order of risk:

## Option 1: Match the tier to your real usage

- **Check consumption.** Compare the actions and credits you used over the last few months with the tier allowances on our [Clay page](/tools/clay). Dropping from Growth to Launch saves $279/month on annual billing.
- **Free tier.** Clay has a Free plan for light, occasional use.

## Option 2: Do account research with an AI assistant you already pay for

The [prospect research workflow](/workflows/prospect-research-with-ai-assistant) shows how to research about 500 accounts a month in batches with Claude or ChatGPT web search, with Google Sheets as the master list. It adds $0/month if you already have an assistant with web search, so replacing the research part of a Growth plan can save up to $446/month. The trade-off is time: about 25–50 manual runs and roughly 8–20 hours a month.

## Contact data is a separate decision

AI assistants don't keep a verified B2B contact database, and emails they produce are often guessed patterns. If Clay was also your email-finding tool, budget for a licensed contact-data provider such as [Apollo](/tools/apollo).

## When to keep paying

Keep Clay if you enrich thousands of accounts a month, need automated enrichment on a trigger, or rely on its waterfall across many data providers on one bill.