The Clay alternative with one flat price

Clay is a workflow spreadsheet that resells 150+ data providers on credits. LeadOcean is one data layer you call over REST or MCP at one flat price. If you use Clay mainly to find people and emails, LeadOcean is the cheaper and more predictable source. If you live in Clay tables, keep Clay and use LeadOcean as the first hop.

Why teams switch from Clay

Two meters, one bill you cannot predict

Clay charges Actions for the work and Data Credits for the data. A fully enriched record typically costs 6 to 20 Data Credits, and every enrichment, HTTP call and AI run also burns an Action (LeadMagic, July 2026).

The HTTP API column sits behind the $495 plan

The Public API and CLI are on every plan, including Free. The HTTP API column, which calls other APIs from a table, starts on Growth, from $495 a month ($446 billed yearly). Launch has none, and table queries through the API are Enterprise (Clay pricing, September 2026; Clay docs, September 2026).

A table is an extra hop at volume

Tables cap at 50,000 rows on Launch and Growth and 200 on Free. They are unlimited on Enterprise (Clay pricing, September 2026). If you need millions of records in code or in an agent, a table is still an extra hop.

Data from many sources, many formats

A waterfall stitches together many providers. Email status depends on which one answered, and validation is often a separate step you pay for.

LeadOcean vs Clay

Clay figures come from clay.com/pricing and the sources linked in each cell, checked in September 2026. Clay changes plans often, so check the page before you buy.

What 1M, 5M and 25M records cost

Clay prices data per record in credits, so cost scales with volume. LeadOcean Pro stays at $499 a month. Clay publishes no price at these volumes, and no self-serve plan sells them. The Clay column multiplies out Clay's $0.05 entry rate per credit, at list rate, if sold at that volume. Ask Clay for a quote at your volume.

Clay arithmetic: 6 credits per fully enriched record x records x $0.05 per credit, at list rate and before any volume discount (LeadMagic, July 2026; Clay pricing, September 2026). Actions add one per enrichment. So 1M records needs 1M Actions, and the largest public Action tier is 200,000 a month.

Clay publishes no price at that volume. Its largest self-serve credit tier is 50,000 a month at $2,125, about $0.0425 a credit, and anything above is an Enterprise quote (Clay pricing, September 2026).

Email-only lookups cost fewer credits than a full record, so your real Clay number depends on what you enrich. Bring your own provider keys and Clay drops the credits but still charges one Action per run.

Where LeadOcean wins

A flat bill at any volume

Pro is $499 a month. Every person or company returned counts as a record, but there is no credit balance to watch and no overage invoice. A very large month is paced down to one request a minute until the reset, not cut off, and one email to support gets you more headroom.

One dataset, one schema

LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies in a single database. Email status comes back on every record, with 13 values from verified and catch_all_valid to risky and spam_trap. You do not merge answers from several providers or pay a second time to validate.

Built for code and agents

The same data is reachable over REST and over MCP. The Free plan includes both, so you can test the whole thing before paying. Send one request and get a profile, email status and, with reveal_email, every email and phone number we hold, for one record.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"linkedin_url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe","reveal_email":true}'

For Claude or Cursor, add the MCP URL https://api.leadocean.io/mcp and sign in with OAuth. No key gets pasted into a chat.

Search and export at database scale

Search people with 50 filters and companies with 34, across 254 countries and 534 industries. Counts are free. Export up to 50,000 rows per request with POST /v1/exports, so a 1M-row pull is 20 calls over two days, not a table you have to split.

Where Clay wins

No-code table workflows

Clay is a spreadsheet you can build a workflow in without writing code. Ops people can edit columns, add conditions and watch each row run. LeadOcean has no table UI, so a non-technical team should stay in Clay.

AI research columns

Claygent runs web research per row: hiring trends, tech stack, funding, leadership changes. It is included on every Clay plan, including Free (Clay pricing, September 2026). LeadOcean gives your own model the data over MCP, but it does not run the research for you.

Niche providers and signals

Clay reaches 150+ data partners, so a long-tail source or a waterfall of fallbacks is one column away. It also tracks job changes and web intent, and it syncs to your CRM on Growth. LeadOcean is one dataset, which is the point when you want volume and the limit when you want a niche source.

Use both: LeadOcean as the first hop in Clay

You do not have to leave Clay to cut credits. Call LeadOcean first through an HTTP API column, and let Clay's paid providers run only on rows LeadOcean could not fill. This needs Clay's Growth plan, where HTTP API lives, and each call still uses one Action. It cuts Data Credits, not Actions.

1. Create a free LeadOcean key at app.leadocean.io/register. The free plan needs no card.
2. In your Clay table, add an HTTP API column. POST to https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich with the x-api-key header and a JSON body holding the person's linkedin_url.
3. Map email_status and the email into columns. Put a run condition on every paid Clay provider so it only runs when the email is empty or the status is not verified.

FAQ