Do you still need Clay?

For the last two years, if you asked me how to scale outbound, I had one answer. Get Clay.

Clay basically a spreadsheet with a brain. You give it a list of companies and it automatically finds the CEOs, their emails, and their open job roles. It turns a week of manual research into a 10-minute coffee break.

But if you’re a user, you know it comes with a headache.

You might stare at your credit usage and worry that one wrong setting will burn $1,000 in two minutes. That’s “credit anxiety.” Or maybe you spend your weekend fixing a workflow that broke just because a website changed its layout.

We put up with it because we had to. We paid the “No-Code Tax” because we didn’t know how to code.

That changed in 2026.

When Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, the barrier to entry collapsed. Now the same Clay experts who sold you on Clay are quietly cancelling their subscriptions. They are moving to the terminal.

Here is why the pioneers are trading expensive tables for affordable agents.

The Three Eras o…