How to Cancel Your Clay Subscription (Without Losing Your Data)

Canceling Clay takes about four clicks. The short version: click your profile picture in the top-right corner, open Settings, go to Plans & billing, and cancel from there. You keep your plan's features until the next payment date, then the workspace moves to the free plan.

Leaving well takes a little more care, and Clay has a twist most tools don't. Clay's own docs say that after a full cancellation, long-term data retention isn't guaranteed if the workspace sits idle, and they recommend downgrading instead. So there are two questions here: how to cancel, and what you want to still exist in six months.

No hard feelings toward Clay. It is the best data workbench in the category, and the enrichment waterfalls are the reason people pay for it. But credit bills grow, and sometimes the pipeline the tables were built for has moved on. When that day comes, you want a clean exit.

What canceling actually does (and doesn't do)

Clay has three different exits, and they are not interchangeable.

Canceling stops the renewal. Clay's FAQ is explicit: you enjoy your plan's features until the next payment due date, and at that point you are moved to the free plan. Your data credit balance stays available until the cycle ends, including any excess you accumulated. After the cycle ends, the balance is capped at twice the new plan's monthly limit, which for the free plan is not much. Tables on free and trial accounts are limited to 50 rows.

The retention wrinkle is the part to read twice. From Clay's credits documentation: "After a full cancellation, your workspace transitions to a free plan temporarily. Your data remains stored, but long-term retention isn't guaranteed after extended inactivity. To ensure your data is preserved, we recommend downgrading instead of fully canceling." Nothing is wiped on the day you cancel. But Clay is telling you not to count on the tables being there after a long silence.

Downgrading keeps the account active on a lower tier. Clay's docs say all of your data, including tables, flows and configurations, stays intact, and you can upgrade again at any time. Downgrades take effect at the next billing date, so you finish the cycle you paid for.

Deleting is permanent and happens at two levels. Deleting a workspace removes all its tables and configurations, deletes the Stripe customer record for that workspace (Clay's wording: "to prevent unexpected charges"), and cannot be undone. Deleting your account deletes your API keys and cannot be undone either. Both require email verification. Clay's terms say the same thing in one line: data is retained as long as your account is active, and if your account is deleted, your data is deleted with it.

There is no undo button for a cancellation in the docs. The way back is the Upgrade plan button that replaces the billing section once you are on the free plan.

Export these three things first

Because of the retention note above, treat the export as the main event and the cancellation as the paperwork.

1. Your enriched tables (export each one to CSV)

Every table you paid credits to build. Open the table, click Actions in the top-right, choose Export..., then Download CSV.

Small tables download in the tab. Bigger ones compile in the background, and the file shows up under Exports (the "My Available Exports" list) when it is ready. In Clay's own walkthrough, each file in that list carries an expiry one day after it was created, so download it the same day rather than queuing twenty exports and coming back on Monday.

Two things Clay's export lesson warns about. Object-type columns (a HubSpot import context, for instance) do not export as readable values, and integration cells whose run condition was not met come out blank. The fix they suggest is an export view: duplicate your current view, hide the noise columns, and export from that. Do this per table. There is no workspace-wide "export everything" button.

2. Your table logic

The CSV holds the rows. It does not hold the recipe: which providers ran in which order, the formulas, the conditional run rules, the AI prompts. That recipe is the expensive part to rebuild, and it lives only in the column configuration.

Before you cancel, open each table you care about and write the column chain down: provider order for each waterfall, formula text, run conditions, prompt text. A screenshot per column settings panel works. If you are downgrading rather than canceling, this step is optional, since Clay says the configuration stays intact. If you are canceling, it is the difference between an afternoon and a week when you rebuild.

Also export your credit usage from Settings, under the Workbooks and Integrations tabs, each of which has an Export button. It is the only record of what each table actually cost you, and you will want it when you size the next tool.

3. Your do-not-contact data

Clay does not send email, so it has no unsubscribe list of its own. But if you are like most teams, some of your tables carry columns that mean "never contact this person": a bounced flag, a "replied: not interested" value pulled back from your sequencer, a manual exclusion column, a suppression list you uploaded to filter against.

That data has legal teeth. Someone who opted out asked not to hear from you. If those flags stay in a Clay table you can no longer open, and you rebuild the same lists elsewhere, you will eventually email someone who said no. That is a spam complaint waiting to happen, and complaint rates are the fastest way to burn a new domain. Export those tables and columns first, and keep the file somewhere the next tool can read it on day one.

The actual cancellation steps

1. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner and select Settings.
2. In the left sidebar, open Plans & billing.
3. Cancel from the billing section. If you want the safer route Clay recommends, click Switch plan and choose a lower tier instead.
4. Confirm. The change takes effect at your next billing date, and the paid features run until then.

If the buttons are not there for you, see the first gotcha below.

Gotchas that catch people

• Admins only. Clay's roles doc says only admins can modify billing settings or buy credits. Editors and viewers do not see the cancel path. Find the workspace admin before you plan the exit date.
• Fees are non-refundable, and the plan auto-renews. Clay's terms say all fees are non-refundable except as set out in the agreement, and every account renews unless canceled before the renewal date. Canceling the day after a renewal buys you a full cycle you did not want. Put the renewal date in your calendar and cancel a few days before it.
• Annual plans front-load the credits. Clay's FAQ says annual plans get all their credits upfront, and the terms say fees are non-refundable. Cancel an annual plan before its renewal date, and expect to keep using the credits you already paid for rather than getting money back.
• Credits shrink at the cycle boundary. Excess credits are usable until the cycle ends. After that, the balance is capped at twice the new plan's monthly allowance. If you have a large balance, spend it on the enrichment passes you actually want before the date, then export.
• Workspace deletion needs a solo workspace. To delete a workspace you must be its only member and it must have no pending invites. Remove teammates first, or the button will refuse.
• The email route exists. Clay's terms name it: you can cancel by emailing support@clay.run as well as in the account. Data-deletion requests go to privacy@clay.com, and the privacy policy commits to a reply within 30 days.

Where your lists go next

Here is the question the tables were answering: who to contact, and with what. Clay's job was to build and qualify the row. Whoever picks up after it has to do the part Clay never did, which is getting the message delivered on accounts that survive it.

One thing before the pitch. If you are leaving Clay because the credit bill outgrew the pipeline, moving the same rows into a spreadsheet does not change what happens when you contact them. What moves reply rates is showing up in more than one place. Say you are an agency running outbound for a B2B client. A 200-lead email-only sequence at a typical 2-3% reply rate gets you 4 to 6 conversations. Run the same list as email plus LinkedIn (a connection request, a view, then a message that references the email), and 8-12% is a realistic band. Same leads, same offer. The difference is that a LinkedIn touch is personal in a way a third follow-up email never is.

That is the migration CampaignStack is built for. Import the CSVs you just exported, keep the do-not-contact columns as exclusions from day one, and rebuild the outreach as workflows that mix email and LinkedIn steps. Every LinkedIn action runs inside per-account daily budgets with automatic risk pauses, and every AI draft passes a critic before a human review queue. The safety model is written up at campaignstack.io/safety.

What does not transfer: the enrichment waterfalls. CampaignStack's enrichment step covers profile scraping and contact lookup through a few providers, not 150 of them behind one column. If that is the part of Clay you will miss, the better move may be downgrading Clay rather than leaving it, and wiring the two together: a Clay automation posts qualified rows into a workflow's webhook source, and a webhook step can send leads back to a Clay table. The Clay vs CampaignStack comparison walks through which layer does what.

Takeaway

Export every table you care about, write down the column logic, and pull the do-not-contact data before you touch billing. Then decide between canceling and the downgrade Clay itself recommends, and do it a few days before the renewal date, as an admin. Your rows survive in a CSV. Your suppression data only protects you if it makes the move with you.