Hey Clay team. I don't know if you're getting heat for this here yet. But a lot of us are really not fans of you charging us 0.1 credit for every useAI api call. That's all. We don't know what we will do next, but it's definitely less desirable to use Clay now. That means if I want to enrich 5000 rows, which is a standard easy day at Clay, I'm spending 500 credits. That's ridiculous and will very quickly add up and make usage of Claygent very undesirable. At that point, we might as well throw our lists the GPT interface and have it do the research there, or use GPT for sheets or open router. You're literally creating the very problem you arrived to solve with Clay - forcing a Russian roulette with csv uploads to multiple tools to accomplish what needs to be done. That's pretty freaking expensive just to run api calls to an llm. Maybe charge .05 or .02 or even .01 per api call. Then you can make money off it while still making it usable at scale.
Also - I get that you don't see agencies as your ICP, and your ideal clients will easily afford the .1 credit cost. But rolling this new MASSIVE charge out to your customers, unannounced, in the dead of night basically, kind of hidden under the positive hype of Sculpt, is an unwelcome business practice from a valuable partner. It does not feel like a good faith effort to help your customers succeed or prepare us for upcoming charges we weren't award of. The lack of communication here was not good.
Wow, instead of competing for the best model they resort to this. Terrible
Thank you Aditi S. I appreciate the reply. It's not that I felt like it was out of the blue. It WAS out of the blue. This was not good customer care in any way. And it is not a small change. With as many AI actions we take, this will easily 5x our spend in Clay. I'm in multiple group chats in both slack and whatsapp and others are saying the same. That price increase alone is a burden enough, and you gave 0 minutes of warning for this. A costumer-first approach would be to warn your customers first of this massive price hike. This was a bad-faith change from a valuable partner. I get that you guys are big and have lots of money and are moving up market. That's fine, even if unpopular with many current users. But doing this without warning gives no time for customers to prepare the business models for this change and has a massive down-funnel effect.
Hey folks - George here, I head up the support team and I wanted to jump in to address this. We take pricing changes extremely seriously, and with that we work extremely hard to conduct experiments and speak with customers prior to making any decisions. This recent credit change was one of those experiments and was never supposed to apply to existing customers. Anyone that was affected by it will get their credits refunded (we're working on that now!) With any pricing change, we always work to be as transparent and proactive as possible. We missed the mark here as we intended this to only impact new customers and we apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. For now, we've shut down the experiment but please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions at all. Your feedback is always appreciated.
i have to echo Grant B. thoughts here George D.. there are a million ways I can think of for clay to make more money but charging people to use their own api keys leaves a really sour taste. to use external api keys already is a higher tier for your pricing plans - why not just gate the feature behind bigger plans? per run credits massively increases costs for those of us doing big runs in clay (which i want to continue doing!).
George D. thank you for the kind response here - we want amplify this to you guys at Clay and for anyone reading. We LOVE Clay and don't blame you guys at all if you want to make profit off of Claygent. Most other AI SaaS tools charge per run and I believe you guys are the exception. If you want to change that, we understand, truly. We're grateful for all you guys have done for us, especially for the agency community. Our only ask is to just find a way to make this scalable and/or give us ample warning to find another way to do what we do with Claygent. We'll continue to push Clay out in the market place for you guys (including moving towards a workspace method of building for clients if that's what you guys really want) if you guys help us continue to make it accessible for us to use.
