Think of it as two separate things happening at once: Clay is doing work, and Clay is buying data on your behalf.
Data Credits cover the cost of the data itself — the email address, phone number, or company detail sourced from one of Clay's 150+ data partners. Because we've negotiated volume discounts directly with our partners, we're able to pass those savings on to you, meaning you're getting comparable data prices through Clay to what you'd find going to most providers directly.
Actions cover the orchestration work Clay does — routing your request, calling the provider, running your workflow, and returning the result to your table. Actions cost less than a cent each and get cheaper with scale.
If an enrichment returns no result, you're not charged Data Credits or Actions. If you bring your own API keys for a data provider, you skip Data Credits entirely and only use Actions for the platform work Clay handles behind the scenes.
For more details, read the Action and Data Credits help doc.
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