A Clay alternative that runs on your own machine — and costs 80% less
Clay.com is an excellent enrichment platform. It is also a hosted black box that bills per credit. For operators who want full control and flat pricing, the math stops working after month two. Here is the alternative we built.
What Clay does well
Clay's core value proposition is clear: a visual enrichment waterfall that strings together 50+ data providers (Apollo, ZoomInfo, Hunter, LinkedIn, Crunchbase) into a single column in a spreadsheet. If you need 8 providers to resolve one email address, Clay is excellent.
The problem starts when you look at the bill. Clay charges per credit, credits are priced in tiers, and a realistic 10k-lead enrichment run eats several thousand credits. The tool is fine; the unit economics are not.
Three problems Clay does not solve
1. It cannot scrape pages you are logged into. Clay runs on their infrastructure. Your LinkedIn session stays on your laptop. Anything behind a login is off-limits unless you hand over your cookie — same trap as PhantomBuster.
2. Your AI agent cannot call Clay directly. Clay is great inside Clay. Outside Clay, there is no API-first way for your Claude or Cursor agent to trigger an enrichment run. You are locked into the spreadsheet-as-pipeline model.
3. Pricing scales with usage, not value. You pay for every credit whether the lead converts or not. A scraper that runs locally on your machine costs the same whether you scrape 10 rows or 10,000.
Stekpad: a flat-rate, MCP-native alternative
Stekpad is a Chrome extension plus a local Model Context Protocol server. The extension scrapes any page you can open in Chrome — including authenticated pages — by clicking what you want. The MCP server exposes every saved recipe as a callable tool for Claude, ChatGPT, and any other MCP-compatible client.
Pricing is flat: €12/month or €99 lifetime on Pro. You can scrape 1,000 leads or 100,000 leads — the bill is the same. There is no credit tier, no per-row tax, no enrichment waterfall markup.
When to pick Clay, when to pick Stekpad
Pick Clay if: you need a chained enrichment waterfall across 8+ paid providers, you already have an ops person managing Clay workflows, and your lead economics absorb €1-2 per enriched record.
Pick Stekpad if: you want flat pricing, you need to scrape authenticated pages your operators already have access to, or you are building an agent-driven workflow where Claude or ChatGPT triggers the scrape and you need an MCP-native tool.
Many teams use both. Clay for the waterfall, Stekpad for the LinkedIn layer and the agent calls. The two tools are complementary more often than competitive.
Try Stekpad free
Unlimited scraping on the Free tier. €99 lifetime if you want Pro.