Everybody's Giving GTM Data Away. Somebody's About to Get Rich, and It Won't Be You.

There's a particular sound a market makes right before the floor gives out, and it sounds a lot like good news.

In the space of ten weeks this spring, two of the most celebrated companies in go-to-market software each shipped an announcement the industry loved. Clay cut the cost of data by 50 to 90 percent. Unify opened its platform with a full read/write API. Operators cheered. Cheaper data. Open infrastructure. The GTM engineer's dream, finally delivered.

It is a dream, right up until you ask what's being given away and why anyone would give it away in the first place. Put the two announcements next to each other and what you're looking at is mostly a race to the basement. Every input that used to be scarce in go-to-market, the data and the tooling and the orchestration and the simple act of reaching a buyer, is getting driven toward zero. And once the inputs to your growth motion cost nothing, whatever you build on top of them has to be worth something on its own. Most of what's being built isn't.

Call it the commoditization of everything. GTM is just the place you can watch it happen in real time.

What Clay actually did

On March 11, 2026, Clay rolled out what it called the biggest pricing change in its history. Three self-serve tiers collapsed into two. Marketplace data costs dropped by half to nine-tenths. Billing split in two, with Data Credits covering lookups and Actions covering the orchestration work like HTTP calls, workflow steps, CRM syncs, and AI operations. HTTP functions that used to be free became billable.

Push past the tier mechanics and the message is hard to miss, because Clay said it plainly. Data is "the fuel of GTM teams," and the company wants to "decrease the cost of data so you use it more." It repositioned itself as "the central hub for every GTM tactic, not just data enrichment." The co-founder published the reasoning in a memo alongside the change and admitted the company expected to lose roughly 10 percent of its revenue because of it.

A company that built a multibillion-dollar valuation on data enrichment chose to take a revenue cut to make data cheaper, because it no longer thinks data is where the money is.

Clay is signaling that the enrichment layer it became famous for has already been commoditized, and the only sane response is to commoditize it faster than the next guy and go capture value higher up. Data is the loss leader now. The hub is the thing they're actually selling.

If the pricing change was the confession, the next launch was the plan. In June, Clay shipped Audiences, which kills the old 50,000-row ceiling and pulls a company's CRM, data warehouse, third-party data, and intent signals into one place with no limit on records. Co-founder Varun Anand described it without any hedging: it's "the data layer your entire GTM stack runs on," and the foundation that all of Clay's future products are built on. Internally, the framing is blunter still. Clay told its own community the legacy plans were "the right model for the data enrichment product," and that the company is now "expanding product surface to support end-to-end GTM infrastructure," which is "a different type of product, which is why we developed the new pricing model." Audiences, they said, "is the foundation of that infrastructure."

Read the two moves together and the strategy stops being subtle. Cut the price of the data toward zero, then make the data unlimited, then declare yourself the layer all of it lives on and all your future products require. The cheap data isn't the gift. It's the bait for the thing that isn't cheap, which is becoming the foundation nobody in your GTM stack can rip out. Figma is already building its entire data foundation on it. That's not a company selling enrichment anymore. That's a company trying to become the floor.

What Unify actually did

Ten weeks later, on May 21, Unify launched its API. The pitch was about closing the gap between data and action. Any system can push signals and targeting data into Unify, and any event inside Unify can push contact and company data back out to the rest of your stack. Clay scores an account, the API pushes it into Unify, a play fires. A website visitor gets de-anonymized and lands in a sequence the same afternoon. Someone opens an email three times in an hour and a webhook pings the rep in Slack before the interest cools off.

Useful stuff. It's also the same confession in a different accent.

Open a full read/write API and you're telling the market your platform is plumbing now. You're inviting every other tool in the stack to pour data through you and pull data back out. That can be a strong place to stand, but it only works if the data running through the pipes is interchangeable, abundant, and not worth hoarding. Unify's own headline example has Clay doing the scoring and Unify doing the actioning. Two of the loudest names in the category now treat each other, openly, as commodity inputs.

The orchestration layer is heading exactly where the data layer already went. Programmable, undifferentiated, cheap.

Stack them up and you can see the floor

Clay says the data is cheap and the value lives in the hub. Unify says the hub is open, so route whatever you like through it. Take both statements at face value and they lead to the same room in the basement.

If data costs a fraction of what it did, and every platform exposes an API so that data can flow anywhere, then inside of eighteen months every serious GTM team will be working from the same signals, enriched by the same providers, scored by similar models, actioned through interchangeable orchestration layers, and delivered by the same managed inboxes. The waterfall that bought you an 8 percent edge on match rates becomes table stakes. The intent signal you paid a premium for becomes a webhook anyone can subscribe to. The clever play your best growth engineer dreamed up becomes a template in a shared library that your competitor downloads on a Tuesday.

That's what commoditization actually does. The tools don't get worse. They get so good and so cheap and so universal that owning them stops meaning anything. The floor is the point where everyone has everything and nobody has a single thing the next team can't grab by lunch.

We're moving toward that floor fast, and both announcements are pressing the accelerator.

Why the bottom is dangerous, not freeing

The hopeful version, the one all the applause rests on, says cheap and open infrastructure democratizes growth. The lean team gets to fight the funded one. The better product finally wins on the merits. There's something to that.

Here's what the hopeful version leaves out, and why "we're heading to basement bottom" should read as a warning rather than a victory lap.

Start with volume. Clay said it without flinching: decrease the cost of data so you use it more. More enrichment, more signals, more sequences, more sends. The whole apparatus is being rebuilt to make contacting more people more often as cheap and frictionless as possible. We already live in the world that produced, the one Unify's own CEO describes as buyers overwhelmed with noise across every channel they have. Driving the cost of data to zero doesn't fix any of that. It hands everyone a bigger hose. Commoditizing data is, in plain terms, the industrialization of spam.

Then there's the moat. Once the data and the tooling and the orchestration are all commodities, the only thing left that anyone can't simply buy is the stuff none of these launches can put in a cart for you. Brand. Judgment. Taste. A real relationship with a buyer who picks up the phone because they trust the name on the screen. The companies that walk out of the basement alive are the ones who treated those as the actual asset the entire time and treated the tooling as the disposable input it was always destined to become. The ones who die down there are the ones who confused the tooling for the strategy.

And then there's where the race actually ends, which is not at zero. Loss-leading on data and giving away your API are the moves of companies sprinting to become the layer nobody can route around before the floor arrives. Somebody ends up owning the hub. Somebody ends up owning the pipes. Clay has already said the quiet part with a product name, calling Audiences the foundation every one of its future products will be built on and inviting your whole stack to live there. The 10 percent of revenue Clay left on the table and the API Unify handed out for free are both wagers that being the last platform standing pays back more than the margin it cost to get there. So commoditization isn't the destination. It's the weapon. The destination is a short list of platforms that own the rails every other company is forced to run on, and that kind of concentrated control over how every business on earth reaches its customers is a far scarier thing than the expensive, fragmented, irritating mess it's replacing.

The part that should worry brands specifically

If you run growth or marketing or a brand, the natural move when data gets cheap is to use more of it, and that's how a lot of teams talk themselves into trouble. I've watched them respond to cheaper inputs by buying more inputs and sending more messages, then spend the next quarter trying to work out why reply rates kept sliding while costs were falling. The math felt like it should have worked. It didn't, because everyone else ran the same play at the same time.

The teams that come through this in decent shape usually do something a lot less satisfying. They accept that the stack is a commodity, wire it up, automate it, and put the savings into the parts of go-to-market that refuse to commoditize: a real point of view, a product people mention without being prompted, a reason for one specific person to want to hear from you that has nothing to do with a signal firing somewhere and a webhook nudging a rep to dial.

None of that is new advice. It's just easy to ignore while your tooling is expensive enough to pass for strategy. Take the cost away and the excuse goes with it.

Cheap data was never going to be your edge anyway. It can't be, when the company down the street is pulling from the same providers you are. What actually sets you apart is the stuff none of these platforms can sell you, enrich for you, or push through an API, and that's usually the stuff teams spend the least time on. The commoditization of everything just makes it harder to keep avoiding.

So the floor keeps dropping, and sooner or later everyone is standing on it. The thing worth figuring out now, while there's still room to, is what you've got left underneath you.