What does your send volume actually cost?

Because they cost differently. Infrastructure — inboxes, domains, provider packages — is priced off the capacity you provision, and you pay it whether you send or not. Data, verification, personalization, and platform fees are priced off what you actually send. Most teams buy far more capacity than they use and never see the gap.

It's what we run in-house. Two forces pull against each other. Cost says go all Microsoft — it's about $2.84 per 1,000 emails versus $6.25 for SMTP and $7.00 for Google. Risk says don't: if your entire volume sits with one provider and their reputation system flags you, everything stops at once. 60/30/10 weights toward the cheap lane while keeping enough spread that a bad week on any one platform costs you a slice, not the campaign.

It's priced per domain, not per mailbox. $25 a month buys one domain carrying 100 sender accounts, and each account safely sends 4 a day — 400 a day per domain, or 8,800 a month across 22 sending days. That's $0.25 per mailbox, which is why it's the cheapest lane in the stack by a wide margin.

Everything ships whole. A Microsoft domain is $25 whether you use 400 sends a day or 40. SMTP comes in $45 packages of 48 inboxes. Google mailboxes round up to 3 per domain. Needing one email past a boundary buys the whole unit. That's why the tool shows provisioned capacity next to what you asked for — the headroom is already paid for, so use it.

About $2,800/month all-in on these assumptions — roughly $475 of infrastructure across 856 mailboxes and 51 domains, plus about $2,330 of operating costs. Add a one-time $94 for the domains. At a 3-email sequence that's 33,000 leads, and the two per-lead costs — $0.03 personalization and $0.02 verification — account for $1,670 of the bill on their own.

Leads, not emails. Infrastructure is the cheap part: $475 buys 100,000 sends of capacity. But every lead costs $0.05 to research and verify before you can email it, and that scales linearly forever. At 300,000 sends a month, personalization and verification together run $5,000 against $1,380 of infrastructure. Shortening your sequence is the lever most people miss — going from 3 emails per lead to 4 cuts your lead count by a quarter at the same send volume.

Less than you'd think, and it's Clay that sets it. Per-lead costs scale down cleanly, so the only real fixed cost is your Clay plan. At 5,000 sends a month on Growth you're paying 13 cents an email, versus 2.5 cents at 300,000 — and $446 of that $656 bill is Clay. If you're under about 25,000 sends a month, Launch at $167 is the honest fit, which brings the same 5,000-send month down to well under half. Infrastructure is never the reason to wait: 5,000 sends of capacity costs $81.

The calculator uses Clay's published starting prices: Launch from $167/month for 15,000 actions and 3,000 data credits, Growth from $446 for 40,000 actions and 6,000 credits. Both scale with credit volume up to 200,000 actions, so the starting price is a floor rather than a quote — size your plan to your real lead volume, because top-up credits carry a 30% premium. Enterprise is custom, and the calculator lets you type your actual number.

No. 60 seconds, no email gate.