Instantly vs Clay vs Apollo: Pricing, Data Credits and Sending Limits Compared

Both vendors publish prices, which puts them in the better half of this market. Of the fourteen outbound tools we track, twelve publish a number and the two that refuse are Outreach and Salesloft. Everything below was read at instantly.ai/pricing and clay.com/pricing on 3 September 2026.

Instantly sells two products and three bundles of them. Instantly Outreach is the sender: Growth at $47 a month for 5,000 emails and 1,000 uploaded contacts, Hypergrowth at $97 for 125,000 emails and 25,000 contacts, and Light Speed at $358 for 500,000 emails and 100,000 contacts plus the server and IP rotation system. Unlimited email accounts and unlimited warmup are on every tier, including the $47 one, which is unusual and is the single strongest thing on Instantly's price list. Instantly Credits is the data product, sold separately: Growth Credits at $47 for 1,500 to 2,000 credits a month, Supersonic at $97 for 5,000 to 7,500, and Hyper at $197 for 10,000. Annual billing takes 10 to 20 percent off depending on the line, with Outreach Growth falling to $37.60 and Light Speed to $286.30.

Clay sells one product on two meters. Launch is $185 a month billed monthly or $167 billed annually and includes 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions. Growth is $495 monthly or $446 annually and includes 40,000 actions a month. There is a free tier with 100 data credits, 500 actions and a 200 row cap per table, which is enough to evaluate the product and not enough to run on. Both paid tiers let you expand either meter independently, and the expansion pricing is published as a grid rather than a single figure, which is the detail that makes Clay hard to budget.

The two meters are worth understanding because they are not marketing. In Clay's own words, data credits cover the cost of the data itself, sourced from its partners, while actions cover the platform work of routing the request, calling the provider and returning the result. Actions reset every cycle and do not roll over. Data credits behave like currency and do roll over, up to twice your monthly allowance on Launch and Growth. Two policies here are genuinely in the buyer's favor and deserve saying plainly: if an enrichment returns no result you are charged neither data credits nor actions, and if you bring your own API key for a provider you skip data credits entirely and pay only actions.

Both vendors meter data in credits, so the useful question is what a credit costs. Neither publishes a per credit figure for every tier, but both publish bundles, and dividing one by the other is arithmetic anyone can repeat. Here is that arithmetic, with the caveat that matters stated first.

The caveat: a credit is not the same unit at the two vendors. A Clay data credit buys one data point from one of its 150 or more partners. An Instantly credit draws on Instantly's own database and its five provider waterfall. Neither company publishes a conversion between the two, and how many credits a given enrichment consumes is shown in product rather than on the pricing page. So the ratio below tells you about the shape of the two price curves, not that one vendor is exactly some multiple cheaper for identical work. Anyone quoting a precise multiple here is overstating what the published data supports.

Clay. The company states data credits start at $0.05 each. Its published bundles bear that out and show how the curve flattens: 2,500 credits a month at $125 a month is exactly $0.05 per credit, while on annual terms 30,000 credits a year at $113 a month works out to $0.045, 120,000 a year at $414 a month to $0.041, and 600,000 a year at $1,913 a month to $0.038. That is a twentyfold increase in volume for about a 15 percent reduction in unit price.

Instantly. Growth Credits at $47 for 1,500 to 2,000 credits is $0.024 to $0.031 per credit. Supersonic at $97 for 5,000 to 7,500 is $0.013 to $0.019. Hyper at $197 for 10,000 is $0.020. Note that Instantly quotes its two smaller tiers as ranges rather than fixed allowances, so the honest reading is a band of roughly two to three cents per credit.

The finding worth keeping. Run the same arithmetic on Clay's action bundles and they behave differently from its data credits: 15,000 actions a month at $60 is $0.0040 each, 40,000 at $150 is $0.0038, 60,000 at $200 is $0.0033 and 200,000 at $540 is $0.0027. That is a 13 fold volume increase for a 33 percent unit discount, against 15 percent on data credits for twenty times the volume. The meter Clay controls, its own platform work, scales with volume the way software normally does. The meter it resells, partner data, barely scales at all. That is not a pricing trick, it is the pass through cost of buying data wholesale, and it tells you something useful: at high volume the data is the bill, and the platform is a rounding error. If your spend is climbing, negotiate the data, not the seat.

Buy Instantly if your constraint is inbox capacity. Unlimited mailboxes and warmup at $47 a month is the cheapest legitimate way to build sending headroom across several domains, and the rotation system on Light Speed is real infrastructure that most competitors charge extra for or do not have. Add Growth Credits only if you do not already have a data source, and check whether the fixed enrichment pipeline covers your filters before you assume it replaces Clay.

Buy Clay if your constraint is that the list does not exist yet. When qualification depends on signals no database sells as a filter, hiring pages, tech stack changes, funding timing, document text, the table and waterfall model earns its price and nothing at $47 replaces it. Budget for both meters, watch the data credit line rather than the plan price, and use the bring your own key route for any provider you already pay for. Our Clay alternative page covers the cases where the workflow builder is more machinery than the job needs.

Buy both if you are a team of five or more running continuous outbound with non obvious targeting. Clay Launch at $185 plus Instantly Hypergrowth at $97 is $282 a month and each product is doing work the other does not. That is a defensible stack. What is not defensible is paying for Clay and using it as a sequencer, or paying for Instantly Credits while a Clay subscription already enriches the same contacts.

Buy neither if what you actually want is researched outreach without assembling a stack. Both of these products assume you will do the thinking: Clay assumes you will design the workflow, Instantly assumes you will supply the judgment about what to say. Coldoutreach is built for the other case, where you paste a company and the research, the first email and the follow up sequence come out of one plan at $39 a month annually, with no second meter to forecast. Our pricing is one number per plan, and you can see how the research reads on the prospecting page.

Partly, and more than it did a year ago. Instantly's Credits product publishes waterfall work email enrichment across five or more providers, full profile enrichment covering company description and headcount, and job posting, news, technology and funding enrichment, plus a web researcher agent and access to five major language models. Those are the enrichments most outbound teams actually run, and having them at $47 a month closes most of the everyday gap with Clay.

What it does not replicate is the programmability. Clay's value is that you can express an arbitrary condition as a column and branch on it, and run a research agent whose prompt you wrote against sources you chose. Instantly gives you a good default pipeline. If your qualification logic fits the default, the $47 product is now genuinely competitive with a $185 one. If your logic is the reason you are prospecting at all, it is not.