A Clay alternative for Claude Code: the data step priced per call

Your outbound already runs from an agent: Claude Code or Codex picks the companies, writes the openers and keeps the list in a file or your CRM. The one step you still pay a monthly plan for is the data: finding the people and their work emails. Clay does that in a spreadsheet with credits on a plan that starts at $167 a month. You want the same lookups as single calls your agent makes, each priced before it runs, with no table to build and no credits to watch.

Doing this for a whole target list? People search shows a real receipt with every row priced, and what the alternatives cost.

Clay is a spreadsheet for go-to-market teams: you build a table, add enrichment columns that run waterfalls across its marketplace of 150 or more providers, ask Claygent, its AI research agent, to read the web for you, and push the rows to your CRM or sequencer. It is paid as a monthly plan with a credit allowance. Ahel is a data catalog your agent calls over MCP: one task per call, several providers behind it ranked by Ahel's own measured success and tried in order, and the price quoted before each run, charged from a prepaid balance. There is no table, no column builder and no research agent; Claude Code, Codex or Cursor is the workflow, and Ahel is the data step inside it.

If your team works in a spreadsheet and does not run an agent, Clay is the right tool. It also does what Ahel does not: waterfalls you design yourself across far more providers, AI research on each row, phone numbers from many sources, templates, and native syncs to HubSpot, Salesforce and sequencers. Ahel only returns data, and your agent writes the rows where you keep them.

When we checked on 2 Nov 2026, people.email.find cost from $0.0005445 per email found when you have a LinkedIn URL (BlitzAPI) and $0.0053174 per contact found from a name and domain (QuickEnrich, the provider ranked first by measured success), people.email.verify $0.0011 per address with Ahel's own check, companies.enrich from $0.0011 per company record, companies.register.search $0.004 per successful call, and companies.search and people.search had a provider with no charge. Shown prices are the provider's cost plus Ahel's 10% margin, every run is quoted before it starts, and a miss is free when the provider does not bill it. You start with $1 free, no card needed, and top up a prepaid balance after that. On the same day clay.com/pricing listed Launch at $167 a month for 3,000 credits and Growth at $446 a month for 6,000 credits, billed yearly, with a free tier of 100 credits; its FAQ quoted $185 and $495, so check the current figures before you compare.

On 2 Nov 2026 we ran people.email.find for 8 public figures from Ahel's own workspace: 7 addresses found, one miss, $0.0420244 in all. The People search page shows every row with its provider, charge and execution id, and the same job on the alternatives at their published prices. Nothing on it is a projection.

ahel.ai/compare/work-email-cost lists every provider behind people.email.find and people.email.verify with Ahel's live price, whether a miss is charged, how often it has worked and its place in the route, next to the monthly plans of Hunter, Tomba, LeadMagic, Findymail, Lusha and Clay as read on 2 Nov 2026.

Ahel is a remote MCP server at https://mcp.ahel.ai/mcp. You can keep Clay for the team's tables and let your agent call Ahel for the lookups it makes on its own, or move the data step over job by job. The find-and-verify guide below is the smallest version: one name and domain in, one verified address out.

Work emails and job titles are personal data. Use them for relevant B2B outreach, honour opt-outs and follow the rules where you sell, such as the GDPR in the EU.