OpenAI Pricing: Clay vs. Personal API Key Comparison

Jonathan M. · 2025-05-29 11:15:03.497815+00

Does anyone know roughly the price difference between using Open AI via Clay (1 credit) and using your own API key?

OpenAI Pricing: Clay vs. Personal API Key Comparison | Clay

14 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Jake G.
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depends on the model and the clay plan you're on. could you share?
Jonathan M.
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I'm on the explorer plan
Jonathan M.
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I've been using Claygent Argon mainly, but considering using GPT 4o
Jonathan M.
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I've read somewhere it's around 10x cheaper to use your own OpenAI API
Jake G.
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ok so 4o might be overkill for a lot of use cases. 4o mini (and now 4.1 mini) are solid 95% of the time for me when I'm using an OpenAI model. Sorry Clay but argon is not as good! explorer with 10k credits works out very crudely at like $0.0349 per credit - that disregards the rest of the value from the plan ofc. the lightweight open AI models can be a lot cheaper. I have a prompt running via 4.1 mini right now returning 1-3 leads for each company in my list costing me about $0.02200 per row. So using my own API key here is about 37% cheaper (or about 1.6x cheaper than a credit). But this is a super complex prompt with a lot of output and taking a lot of steps (15-20+ every run). For simpler tasks it gets even cheaper. I have another claygent prompt running with 4o-mini and it's costing me $0.00097, so almost 100% or 36 x cheaper than a credit.
Jake G.
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best thing to do is load up 50 usd onto open ai's api platform and do some testing/playing around with different prompts to see how the cost is looking. hope it helps 🙂
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Jonathan M.
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Amazing, thanks for the in-depth response Jake G.
Jonathan M.
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Most of my prompts are relatively simple so if it's anywhere near 36x cheaper, that'll be the route for me to take
Jonathan M.
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I've loaded up $50 but Clay is still saying I'm on Tier 1 so unable to use the system
Jake G.
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you're very welcome
Jake G.
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and haha yup, the tiers are a pain when you first get started. it's an openai thing rather than a clay thing. good news is you'll move up to tier 2 with >50 USD spend automatically after 7 days. once you spent 100 USD and 14 days you're in tier 3 which is a much less restricted place to be. if you're lucky and sweet talk openai a little, they might bump you into tier 2 straight away without the wait time, but otherwise it's a waiting game!
Jonathan M.
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Ah maybe I'll get in contact with their support and see if they'll bump me up - I've only topped up my account with $50, not spent it, does that matter?
Jake G.
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it's worth a go, and yeah that's fine. just make sure it's actually 50 usd worth of credits, not 50 usd inc. taxes. it needs to be 50 USD of credits to get bumped up
Jonathan M.
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Yeah I've spent over $60 which gives me $51 account balance - I'll reach out to them now
🙌1

Jake G.
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depends on the model and the clay plan you're on. could you share?
Jonathan M.
·
·
I'm on the explorer plan
Jonathan M.
·
·
I've been using Claygent Argon mainly, but considering using GPT 4o
Jonathan M.
·
·
I've read somewhere it's around 10x cheaper to use your own OpenAI API
Jake G.
·
·
ok so 4o might be overkill for a lot of use cases. 4o mini (and now 4.1 mini) are solid 95% of the time for me when I'm using an OpenAI model. Sorry Clay but argon is not as good! explorer with 10k credits works out very crudely at like $0.0349 per credit - that disregards the rest of the value from the plan ofc. the lightweight open AI models can be a lot cheaper. I have a prompt running via 4.1 mini right now returning 1-3 leads for each company in my list costing me about $0.02200 per row. So using my own API key here is about 37% cheaper (or about 1.6x cheaper than a credit). But this is a super complex prompt with a lot of output and taking a lot of steps (15-20+ every run). For simpler tasks it gets even cheaper. I have another claygent prompt running with 4o-mini and it's costing me $0.00097, so almost 100% or 36 x cheaper than a credit.
Jake G.
·
·
best thing to do is load up 50 usd onto open ai's api platform and do some testing/playing around with different prompts to see how the cost is looking. hope it helps 🙂
Loading attachments
Jonathan M.
·
·
Amazing, thanks for the in-depth response Jake G.
Jonathan M.
·
·
Most of my prompts are relatively simple so if it's anywhere near 36x cheaper, that'll be the route for me to take
Jonathan M.
·
·
I've loaded up $50 but Clay is still saying I'm on Tier 1 so unable to use the system
Jake G.
·
·
you're very welcome
Jake G.
·
·
and haha yup, the tiers are a pain when you first get started. it's an openai thing rather than a clay thing. good news is you'll move up to tier 2 with >50 USD spend automatically after 7 days. once you spent 100 USD and 14 days you're in tier 3 which is a much less restricted place to be. if you're lucky and sweet talk openai a little, they might bump you into tier 2 straight away without the wait time, but otherwise it's a waiting game!
Jonathan M.
·
·
Ah maybe I'll get in contact with their support and see if they'll bump me up - I've only topped up my account with $50, not spent it, does that matter?
Jake G.
·
·
it's worth a go, and yeah that's fine. just make sure it's actually 50 usd worth of credits, not 50 usd inc. taxes. it needs to be 50 USD of credits to get bumped up
Jonathan M.
·
·
Yeah I've spent over $60 which gives me $51 account balance - I'll reach out to them now
🙌1