Manage Clay Credits

Prerequisites

• Clay account with a credit balance
• At least one enrichment table set up

Steps

1. Understand Clay's credit model. Each enrichment action (find email, verify email, enrich company, find people) costs credits. Costs vary by provider -- basic lookups cost 1 credit, premium providers like Clearbit cost 2-5 credits per row. Waterfall enrichment charges only for the provider that returns data.

2. Check your credit balance. Use the Clay API to check remaining credits and monthly allocation. Set up a low-balance alert at 20% remaining to avoid mid-campaign interruption.

3. Budget credits per campaign. Before running enrichment, calculate expected cost: (Number of rows) x (Credits per enrichment column) x (Number of enrichment columns). A typical enrichment workflow (company + person + email + verify) costs 5-8 credits per row.

4. Use conditional enrichment. Add "Run if" conditions to expensive enrichment columns. Example: only run Clearbit enrichment if Apollo returned no data. Only verify emails that were successfully found. This can reduce credit usage by 30-40%.

5. Set table row limits. Cap your table size before running enrichment. Start with 50 rows for testing, then scale to 200 once you have confirmed your enrichment columns work correctly.

6. Track ROI on credits. Calculate cost per qualified lead: (Credits used x Credit cost) / Qualified leads generated. If a campaign costs $50 in credits and produces 10 qualified leads, your cost per lead is $5. Compare this across campaigns to optimize spend.