Clay

What it actually does

Clay is a spreadsheet-shaped enrichment engine. You start with a list — accounts, people, form-fills — and stack "enrichments" on top: waterfall data lookups, scraping, and GPT columns that write, classify, or research each row. The result is a table where every contact arrives pre-qualified and pre-personalized.

The unlock is the waterfall. Instead of paying one provider a flat rate, Clay tries provider after provider until it finds a match, and you only pay for the hit. For most teams that alone pays the subscription.