Clay’s new pricing is probably my fault. We were paying $314 a month, but using (based on their new model) $214,087.50 worth of Clay a WEEK. Here’s the story: A year ago Clay's head of product hopped on a call with me. I told him we were hitting their platform 17.3 million times per week. Almost all custom events (i.e. HTTPs) I remember his response being something close to "Holy shit, I think you are the largest user of Clay" I said yeah that doesn't surprise me. But then it also came up that we were only paying $3,769 a year. We talked about HTTPs, custom integrations, how we were basically using Clay as a giant API orchestration layer. I knew his wheels were turning. If you saw my last post, you know we eventually replaced Clay entirely with a $200/mo Claude Code subscription. 272,000 leads per second vs Clay's 27 hours for the same volume. But before we left, we were the perfect case study for why Clay's old pricing was broken. $314/mo for 17.3 million weekly, for what they now call ‘actions’. Run the math. We were paying $0.00001815 per action. Clay announced their new pricing structure. They split everything into Data Credits and ‘Actions.’ Actions are HTTPs, custom integrations, API calls. The exact things we were doing 17.3 million times a week. The new price per action credit works out to about 1.24 cents each. A 681% price increase for us I know you might say, "But Clay is letting people stay on the old pricing if they want," and I hear you but I also don't know how it makes me feel that someone brand new would have to pay $856,350 per month to get the same advantages I had when I was starting out only 3 years ago. I'm not saying that one call caused the entire restructuring. But I am saying their head of product learned that day that someone was running 17 million HTTPs a week for the price of a nice dinner. And now every HTTP costs 1.24 cents. anyways For the last year, we've been trying to figure out how to get off of our dependency on Clay. That was until Cursor / Claude Code / Codex came out My VP of Growth, @James, who doesnt know how to write a single line of code, touched Claude Code for the first time And three weeks later he replaced Clay for us We could process 272k rows per second now for the cost of a Claude Code sub My last post was about that system Then after that post, Clay announces new pricing that specifically monetizes the exact thing we were doing at a massive scale. Coincidence? Maybe. But I may owe everyone using Clay an apology If your Clay bill just went up, you can probably blame me for that one. Sorry! I put together a system blueprint of what I did to replace Clay for myself -- every tool, the tech stack, a Clay vs custom comparison, and a 6-step playbook for building your own. Plus a video walkthrough where I show you the live system and how each tool actually works. Reply CODE below and I'll DM it to you.

Clay is charging $0.0124 PER API call now?? Did I read that right? WHOA

I just got to visit with an infra provider who sends 1 TRILLION emails / week. They told me exactly why I was spending $50k on Instantly / mn which would burn two days later. Here’s what I learned: For context, we now have a private infrastructure provider called Halo. We switched to them after burning through 100’s of 1000’s of dollars on Google and Azure email accounts. It was the same playbook you're probably running right now of "X domains, 3-5 email accounts per domain 10-25 emails per account" Halo is built by a billion dollar B2C email company that you absolutely know the name of, and for the last 2 months we’ve been the only ones allowed to send cold emails on their sending rail. Since they send a TRILLION+ of emails a week, they’re in weekly conversations with Google and Outlook. Hence they have a wild amount of data. I had a deep dive sesh on exactly what we needed to do to get results for our clients. I shouldn’t even be giving this information away since half my followers are competitors. The basic answer was: Google and Outlook know EXACTLY what the cold email community is doing. Think of everything you've been taught that is supposed to help deliverability: The templates sent across hundreds of accounts spread between lookalike domains. The spintax. The AI-written personalization. The warmup networks where a bunch of inboxes suddenly start talking to each other in ways normal employees never would. The A/B tests where you create 1,000 slightly different ways to say the same thing. All the stuff I used to do. All you're doing is training the AIs reading the inbox on the infinite permutations of how you make your offer Halo basically told me that the current cold email deliverability meta is completely BACKWARDS. Everybody is trying to make a cold email look like a normal employee email but Google is not dumb. There’s a CTA in your damn cold email bro. It’s obvious. So now we’re changing how we send. No AI personalization. (which I have known is BS for a year now) No spintax. No warmup. (which I have known is BS for 3 years now) No reply based CTAs (reply X and I’ll get you Y) Y’all are trying to look like the wrong type of email. What is a type of email that can have CTAs all day long? Marketing emails Only basic merge fields, full HTML with images and links to book a call or go to the client's website. For proof, every client we moved from Instantly to Halo had a minimum 30% uplift in sign-ups, meetings booked, and paying customers, and the best client had a 5.1x multiplier. And if your entire strategy is still “buy more inboxes, warm them up, add spintax, use AI personalization, and make it look like a rep wrote it”... I've got bad news for you. We've stopped trying to look like a regular employee email. The game is changing. Like every other trend in the cold email world that hit me 6 to 12 months before it hit everybody else, this one's coming for you too.

Google/Outlook AI spam filters are here. I've had to hire a full-time human copywriter and now send all our cold emails one day per week. I know I’ve said versions of this before. I’m saying it again because I don’t think people understand how bad the old cold email playbook is about to get. For the last few years, we all tried to make cold email look like it came from a normal employee. 3-5 inboxes per domain. 10-25 emails per inbox. Lookalike domains. Spintax. AI personalization. Warmup networks. Hundreds of almost-identical messages spread across thousands of accounts. Then we lost 31,000 inboxes in a single day. After that, our infrastructure started burning faster and faster. First it lasted a month. Then three weeks. Then two. Then one. Our infrastructure cost went up 13x because we were replacing it every week. We were burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars in Google and Azure accounts. At one point I was spending $50k/month on Instantly infrastructure that would burn within two days of sending emails. Google and Outlook knew EXACTLY what we were doing. A cold email with a CTA is obviously not a normal employee email. The more aggressively you try to disguise it, the more data you give the filters on what cold email looks like. AI-written copy is becoming another signal. New models like Opus, Fable and Sol are now watermarked, by EU law, in ways Google/Outlook can track. So I hired a human copywriter. It sucks because AI was able to write HUNDREDS of variations of copy the second we onboarded a client. Now since we're only sending one email a week, a human who can get us 80% to message-market-fit without being detected is invaluable. We're already seeing it work at insane scale. For one of our clients, the HTML version is getting 30% more meetings than the plain-text version we used when optimizing for replies. They booked 92 meetings from roughly 293,000 emails in 90 days, with zero positive replies. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong about the watermark stuff. I don’t think I’ll be proven wrong about this: The agencies that keep buying more inboxes, adding more spintax, and trying harder to look human are playing a game Google and Outlook already understand.

DOPE. Like I said above, fucking love Clay and everything you guys have been doing. I know you're cooking on some cool shit that's just around the corner. I still think 99% of everybody reading this post should be using you guys but we gotta move fast because we do some big shit for our clients lol.

I’ve noticed cold email gets wayy easier when you stop treating it like a sales sequence. So many people send 3-4 sequences to a few thousand carefully crafted 14 waterfall high intent list. Worst advice ever. Treat it like a private ad channel. 1 email = 1 creative 1 segment = 1 audience The metric = emails needed to get a signup, meeting, or customer For Fyxer, we found that every positive reply was associated with 2.11 signups on average because a bunch of people would see the email, research it themselves, and sign up without replying.

@Rpaulindaigle I send about 15 “looms” a day. cap.so/ is by far the best thing out there.

Looking for a copywriter for our cold emails. Nothing can be written by Ai. DM me if you know somebody They need to be better at copy then I am

Everyone will hate AI-generated video until it gives us a proper GOT season 8 based on the books. Pending if GRRM actually finishes the books

I’m honored by how many people’s first thoughts were “is this a marketing stunt?” The hook would have made Adam so proud.

People are telling me my last post made Clay change their pricing? Is that right?

So everybody in cold email is just copying my “Hit your TAM every 30-60 days” huh? Dope. Always a good sign when everybody starts copying you.

@myuan95 Wtf are you talking about? You don’t know how to hit Google Maps? It’s a pretty straightforward api lol

My rule of thumb is 100,000 emails before making a serious call on whether cold email works. You need real infrastructure, enough volume, multiple variants, and someone willing to say the offer isn't landing. I see far to many people claiming it's a dead channel after hand-picking a list of people they think would be good fits and saying "can I send a loom/audit your current system" Not going to work

Adam Robinson's RB2B is doing $9M/year. 42% of that revenue comes from cold email campaigns we've been running for 2.5 years. He's launching MoltSets next. We're running the cold email again. Here's EXACTLY what our plan is. Steal it. 1st, what is MoltSets. $500/month for unlimited B2B data. Hook it up to Claude Code, Codex, whatever AI agent you're running. Five thousand hits a minute. No caps. The kind of data infrastructure that used to take a full data engineering team. Now one person with an AI agent and a $500 subscription does the same thing. IT'S DOPE. 2nd, why this time is completely different. Cold email is not what it was 9 months ago. Smartlead. Instantly. EmailBison. Great tools for most people. but they basically stopped working for us. So We went and got access to something nobody else in B2B has. We were at Acquisition HQ last week. Hormozi's team told us 3% CTR was good. They lost their fucking minds when we told them we're getting 30%. We call it Halo. Halo is why we're comfortable starting Adam at real volume. 3rd, our plan. We're starting at 1 million emails a month. Volume first, then follow the heat. Test messaging variants at scale. Iterate on offers weekly. Let the marketplace tell us what converts. If I had to guess what's going to work best, it's probably going to be these industries: Information Technology and Services. Marketing and Advertising. Staffing and Recruiting. Management Consulting. Financial Services. Venture Capital and Private Equity. For company size, headcounts between 11 and 200 employees. but I'm probably going to be wrong about that. The market will prove me wrong, and that's the point. We don't guess and commit. We send, we measure, we double down on what the data says. We should sign up thousands of users month one. 4th, what you get from this. We're building this entire MoltSets launch in public. Here on X. Every week we send our clients a Loom: what we learned, what worked, what flopped, and what we're doing next. Emails sent. Copy. Replies. CTR. What printed. What got smoked. Real numbers, straight from the dashboard in Outfound The Loom we send Adam is the Loom we'll post here, for you. Follow me and you'll see the raw data as we go. If a campaign prints, you'll see it. If 95% of the campaigns SUCK (and they will), you'll see it too. No polished case study six months later. I put together a full playbook for you too: our exact MoltSets launch plan plus an intro to Halo. Half strategy. Half weapon reveal. Comment "plan" and I'll DM it to you. P.S. Later this week I'm going deep on how Halo actually works. If you want the infra breakdown behind those numbers, comment "plan" and follow along.