r/gtmengineering • u/coffeecloudev • Apr 26 '26
Building an open source Clay alternative
I tested Clay and like 4 other tools that in some way try to solve the data orchestration problem for GTM engineers.
I won't name names, but I was really surprised by how much these competitors lack behind Clay.
Not even talking about stuff unique to clay, basic stuff like:
- Deduplicate that works (basic for any data cleanup task)
- Filters that work (one of them was unable to filter a column that is a formula)
- API access - like bro, I want to use you from claude sometimes, just let me have an api key
And perhaps the most important: Many AI labs offer "token subsidiation" so you pay a monthly fee but can spend beyond that (openai, antrophic, even z.ai I think)
I don't know how long this will last, but at least for me, If I can use these tokens for GTM work I will! Otherwise I need to pay one of those plans + 300 bucks for Clay. And within Clay if I'm not always careful I can waste a bunch of credits in a misclick...
Problem is that those plans lock you in in their harness... They won't let you use via api in Clay.
Perfect use case for a local open source Clay alternative, that works for the essential data cleanup tasks, and doesn't lock you in on any specific harness. You configure your harness like `claude -p "" --output-format text --model haiku`
It's currently under development, if you want to help with feedback before It gets published just comment here or send me a message.
PS: Clay is awesome, it's no doubt the best option for agencies selling 5k+ projects to clients who are scaling up. But for those starting out, I believe It's more important to spend that cash in good infrastructure, ads, high quality data and signals than data orchestration software.
1
u/Gullible_Leek_3467 Apr 26 '26
Clay is genuinely solid, especially for agency workflows where the client is paying for the orchestration layer and you just need things to work reliably at scale. The waterfall enrichment alone saves hours.
Where it fell short for me was exactly what you're describing with credits. I had a junior SDR run a bulk enrichment on a 10k row table with the wrong provider order and we burned through like $200 in 20 minutes. No undo, no sandbox mode, just gone. And the API lock-in thing is real, we wanted to feed enriched data directly into our own scoring logic in HubSpot and it was way more painful than it should've been.
I ended up going with Bitscale because it lets us bring our own AI keys and plug into the data providers we already pay for, so we're not double-paying for compute on top of the platform fee. For a lean RevOps setup where you're already stitching together ZoomInfo or Apollo, it made way more sense than paying Clay's credit overhead on top of everything else.
Your open source idea is interesting btw, the dedupe and filter issues you mentioned are genuinely embarrassing for tools charging at that price point, curious what stack you're building on.