Decision guide
API options for teams replacing the data step of a Clay workflow
What Clay actually sells, what you lose by leaving it, and the three shapes of API that can take over the enrichment step: managed waterfalls, single providers, and a waterfall you run yourself.
Written for people asking: Which Clay alternatives offer waterfall enrichment through an API for growth teams?Which People Data Labs alternatives let my agent compare multiple enrichment providers?What are the best APIs for enriching leads when different providers cover different markets?
Clay is an orchestration product, not a data API: it runs a waterfall across more than 200 vendors inside a table and charges pass-through data credits, from $167 a month (or $54 a month billed annually), with HTTP API integrations listed on the $446 Growth plan. If what you want is only the enrichment step, called from your own code or agent, there are three replacement shapes: a managed waterfall API that tries several providers per request (BetterContact, FullEnrich, Treg), a single provider with its own finder and verifier (Hunter, Findymail, Icypeas, Prospeo), or a waterfall you write over two or three of those. None replaces Clay's tables, triggers, AI columns or CRM sync. In a 10-contact fixture, Treg's routed finder needed a second provider on 4 of 10 calls and billed $0.054 in total.
What Clay is, in Clay’s words
Before comparing alternatives it is worth being precise, because “Clay alternative” lists usually compare it to data vendors it is not. From Clay’s own pages, read 14 September 2026:
- It describes itself as infrastructure “to get any data, run agentic workflows, and launch GTM plays”, and lets you “buy data from 200+ providers in one place”.
- Its waterfall “lets you search sequentially across multiple tools until you find a valid match”, and “once validated data is found, additional consumption stops. If the entire waterfall fails, nothing is consumed.”
- Data Credits “are used to buy data or AI from 3rd party vendors in Clay’s data marketplace”. Connecting your own vendor API keys “will eliminate the Data Credit cost”, though an Action is still consumed.
- The public API’s Tables primitive is read-only; data gets in through webhooks and out through integrations.
So Clay sells the table, the waterfall logic, the vendor marketplace and the automation around them. The data itself comes from the same providers listed below.
What you lose by leaving
Be honest about this before you rebuild it:
- The vendor marketplace. One account, 200+ providers, no separate contracts. Every replacement below narrows that to a handful.
- Waterfall configuration without code. Order, conditions, fallbacks, validation, all in a column.
- Everything around enrichment. Triggers, AI research columns, scoring, CRM sync, sequencing hand-offs.
- The 2× data-credit rollover and the annual price. $54 a month billed annually for 3,000 data credits is not expensive if the table is your whole workflow.
If you use those, stay. The rest of this page is for teams whose workflow already lives in code or in an agent and who only want the enrichment call.
Three replacement shapes
1. A managed waterfall behind one API. You send a name and domain (or a LinkedIn URL); the vendor tries several providers and returns the first valid result. BetterContact and FullEnrich do this over their own provider partnerships; Treg does it over 14 finder and 15 enrichment providers, and tells you which one served. This is the closest to Clay’s waterfall column, minus the table.
2. One provider with a finder and a verifier. Hunter, Findymail, Icypeas and Prospeo each sell a find-then-verify pair on the entry plan. Cheapest per hit when they hit; no fallback when they do not.
3. Your own waterfall. Call two or three of shape 2 in sequence, stop at the first verified hit. You get Clay’s stop-on-hit economics with full control, at the cost of two or three vendor accounts, keys and rate limits to maintain.
| Provider | Billing model | Lowest paid entry | Per email found (entry tier) | Charged on a miss? | API on lowest plan? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Treg (routed endpoints)pricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Pay per successful call from a prepaid USD balance; no plan | None (prepaid balance, top up any amount) | $0.0054 | No (routed per-success children; a miss moves to the next provider) | Yes (API, CLI and MCP) |
| BetterContactpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with monthly credits and capped rollover | $15/month (Starter, 200 credits); API is a $199 add-on on Starter | $0.075 | No | No ($199 add-on on Starter; included from Pro at $49/month) |
| FullEnrichpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with monthly credits; charged only on found data | $55/month (Pro, 1,000 credits) | $0.055 | No | Yes |
| Hunterpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with monthly credits; separate prepaid Data Platform for API-only use | $49/month (Starter, 2,000 credits) or $34/month annual | $0.025 | No | Yes (all plans) |
| Findymailpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with monthly finder credits plus bonus verifier credits | $99/month (Starter, 5,000 finder + 5,000 verifier credits) | $0.020 | No for finder endpoints; verifier charges 1 credit per attempt | Yes (all plans) |
| Icypeaspricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with credits that never expire | $19/month (Basic, 1,000 credits) or $190/year, plus VAT | $0.019 | No for finders; verification is 0.1 credit per address tested | Yes (API and MCP on Basic) |
| Prospeopricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription per user with monthly credits, pooled per team | $49/user/month (Starter, 2,000 credits) or $37/user/month annual | $0.025 | No | Yes on Starter (5 req/s, 2,000/day) |
| Apollo.iopricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription per user with an annual credit pool; API draws credits | $49/user/month billed annually (Basic) | $0.020 | No (people enrichment); organisation enrichment not stated | Yes (most endpoints; plan sets rate limits) |
| Claypricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with Actions and Data Credits; credits buy third-party data | $167/month (Launch) or $54/month billed annually | $0.028 | No | No (HTTP API integrations listed from Growth at $446/month; developer platform read-only on lower plans) |
How the waterfalls charge
The economics of a waterfall are all in what happens on a miss and who you pay when it finally hits:
| What is billed | On a total miss | Provider visibility | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clay | Data credits per validated result, plus an Action per row | Nothing | You choose and order the vendors |
| BetterContact | “Per valid data point returned, not per API call and not per provider tried”; email + verification is 1 credit | Nothing (404, no charge) | Provider not named in the response per its docs |
| FullEnrich | 1 credit per found work email, 10 per mobile; “credits are only consumed when we actually find a result” | Nothing | Provider not named |
| Treg | The serving provider’s own per-hit rate, no markup; misses on per-success providers are free; per-call cost cap via a header | Nothing on per-success providers; a per-call provider in the route can bill a miss, which is why the cap header exists | Response names the provider that served and every provider tried |
Note the difference between BetterContact’s model (a credit is the same price whichever provider answered) and Treg’s (you pay the answering provider’s actual rate, which in our run ranged from $0.0048 to $0.005 per email but can reach $0.08 for some providers on a LinkedIn-URL input). One is predictable; the other is cheaper on average but variable per call.
What a routed waterfall did on ten contacts
Receipt · Work email from name + domain, routed · 2026-09-14
Run from a Treg account on 2026-09-14 with a $0.25 per-call route cap. Latency is wall-clock from the CLI, including network. Cost is what the account was billed, read from the response. Ten inputs is a fixture, not a benchmark: it shows the mechanics and the order of magnitude, not a hit rate you should plan on.Download the masked receipts or re-run the fixture.
Four of the ten inputs missed on the first provider and hit on the second. The first attempt on those four cost nothing. That is the whole argument for a waterfall over a single provider: the observed hit rate of any one finder across Treg’s traffic is 25% to 40%, so a single-vendor call on a real list misses more often than it hits, and a second provider roughly doubles coverage at no cost for the miss.
When to stay on Clay
- Your process is the table: people edit rows, add AI columns, trigger sequences from it.
- You want to try a new vendor next week without a new contract.
- Your volume fits the annual plan and someone on the team owns the workflow.
When to leave: the workflow is already code, you call enrichment from an agent or a backend, and you are paying for a table nobody opens.
Next step
- Treg’s lead-list workflow is a full find-then-verify run with the receipt, and the docs cover the
X-Treg-Route-WaterfallandX-Treg-Route-Max-Costheaders that control the waterfall. - BetterContact’s credits reference and FullEnrich’s credit docs are the authoritative sources for their charging rules.
- For a single-provider or self-built waterfall, the contact enrichment API guide has the full 17-provider table and the observed hit rates per finder.
Spotted an error or a changed price? Email corrections@enrichmentapiguide.com with the page URL and a source. Corrections are logged on the corrections page.