Clay is now Mesh: what changed, what's free, and the alternatives

Clay, the personal CRM at clay.earth, is now called Mesh. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired Clay in June 2025; the app was renamed Mesh on 25 March 2026, and clay.earth now redirects to me.sh. Mesh has a free plan for up to 1,000 contacts (a credit card is required to sign up), and Pro costs $10 a month billed yearly or $20 month to month (checked 20 October 2026).

It is not the same company as Clay.com, a sales-data platform, which is the source of most of the confusion. Below: the timeline, what’s free now, what Mesh actually reads from your accounts, and the alternatives if the changes don’t suit you. Tera Chat is our app; we’ve tried to be fair, and we say where others are the better pick. Everything here comes from Mesh’s own pages, checked on 20 October 2026.

What happened to Clay?

Clay joined Automattic in mid-2025 and changed its name the following spring, keeping the same team. These are the dated milestones from Mesh’s own posts:

Date	What happened	Source
June 2025	Clay announces it has been acquired by Automattic; the founders say the whole team stays on	Mesh: Accelerating Clay’s mission with Automattic
12 January 2026	Nexus 4.0, Clay’s AI “navigator for your network”, gets more actions (managing groups, finding duplicates)	Mesh changelog
25 March 2026	“Clay is now Mesh”: “same team, same mission, new name”	Mesh: Clay is now Mesh
19 May 2026	Android beta sign-ups open	Mesh changelog
12 August 2026	Mesh for Android launches on Google Play	Mesh changelog
7 October 2026	Changes to the Mesh API and the MCP, Zapier and Make integrations	Mesh changelog

On 20 October 2026, clay.earth and clay.earth/pricing both returned a permanent redirect (HTTP 301) to the matching page on me.sh. The me.sh site carries an Automattic copyright line.

Is Mesh the same as Clay.com?

No. They are two unrelated products that shared a name:

• Mesh (formerly clay.earth) is a personal CRM: your contacts, reminders to reconnect, birthdays and notes about people you know.
• Clay.com is a go-to-market platform for sales and revenue teams, combining data sourcing, AI research agents and workflow automation to find prospects. Its tagline is “Build systems to grow revenue”.

If you searched “Clay CRM” to find leads, you want Clay.com. If you wanted to keep up with people you already know, you want Mesh.

What’s free in Mesh now?

The free plan is generous for personal use. Prices as listed on Mesh’s pricing page on 20 October 2026:

Plan	Price	What you get
Personal	Free; credit card required	Up to 1,000 contacts; search and groups; Reconnect, reminders and birthday notifications; life updates (job changes, location changes, news mentions); imports from email, calendar, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, iMessage and more
Pro	$10/mo billed yearly, $20/mo billed monthly; 14-day trial	Unlimited contacts; CSV and spreadsheet import; priority support; invoice billing; faster data refreshes
Team	$40 per seat/mo billed yearly, $49 monthly	Everything in Pro, up to 4 team members, advanced data enrichment, custom setup, admin controls
Enterprise	Contact sales	Unlimited members, import from 100+ tools, SAML SSO, a dedicated success manager

Two details worth knowing. Mesh says it requires a card even for the free plan to keep out spam and bot accounts. And students, educators and nonprofits can ask for three months of Pro free.

What does Mesh connect to, and what does it read?

Mesh lists 16 integrations, but they read very different amounts. Its integrations page names Address Book, ChatGPT, Contacts, CSV, Facebook, Gmail, Google Calendar, iMessage, Instagram, Make, Microsoft Outlook, Notion, phone calls, X, WhatsApp and Zapier. LinkedIn appears in the pricing page’s list of import sources rather than as an integration.

• Gmail, Outlook and Google Calendar create contacts for people you’ve emailed or met and show that history on their cards.
• iMessage works only from the Mac app downloaded from Mesh’s site, not the App Store build, and needs Full Disk Access and Contacts access. It creates contacts for people you’ve texted and adds “text moments” to their cards, but Mesh’s help article says it “won’t import any of the content of your messages”. It isn’t available on iPhone or the web. (If Full Disk Access is new to you, our explainer covers what it allows.)
• WhatsApp is listed, and its page promises to sync “conversations, attachments, and updates” into contact profiles. We found no help article explaining how it connects or what it stores, so ask Mesh before relying on it.
• X creates and enriches contacts and surfaces their significant posts; Facebook creates contacts for your Facebook friends and adds birthday notifications.

How Reconnect reminders work

Reconnect is Mesh’s keep-in-touch feature, and it’s smarter than a plain timer. You choose weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or Automatic for a person or a group, and Mesh counts from your most recent interaction (a call, calendar event, email or message from a connected account), so contacting someone early pushes the next reminder back. With Automatic, Mesh decides when to remind you based on when you last interacted (Mesh help: Reconnect).

Is Mesh private?

Mesh is a cloud service: your contacts and notes live on its servers, and it says it is SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Two things matter more than the certificate for most people:

1. It enriches contacts with public data. Life updates (job changes, location changes, news mentions) are a selling point for networking. For friends and family, consider whether you want that.
2. Its iMessage import doesn’t read your texts. It keeps contact details and “text moments”, not what was said. That’s a privacy plus, and also means Mesh can’t tell you that a friend asked you something you never answered. (Its WhatsApp page, which promises to sync conversations, is less clear about what it keeps.)

Mesh alternatives

If the rename or the card requirement has you looking around, these are the realistic options, checked 20 October 2026:

App	Price (checked 20 Oct 2026)	Platforms	Messaging sources	Privacy model	Best for
Mesh (formerly Clay)	Free up to 1,000 contacts (card required); Pro $10/mo billed yearly or $20 monthly	Web, Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android	iMessage contacts (no message text), WhatsApp, Instagram, email, calendar, X, Facebook; LinkedIn import	Cloud; adds public updates to contacts	The best free contact hub
Dex	Premium $12/mo billed yearly, $16 quarterly, $20 monthly; 6-day trial, card required	iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, web, Chrome extension	WhatsApp (daily), iMessage (hourly via Mac app, beta), Instagram DMs, LinkedIn, email, calendar	Cloud, US-hosted; says it sells no data	Deeper LinkedIn and messaging sync
Monica	Self-host free; hosted $9/mo or $90/yr	Web (native apps planned after v3)	None: manual entry	Open source; never sold or used to train AI	Privacy and control
Tera Chat	App and inbox free; AI with your ChatGPT account or a Claude or Grok API key, or AI Plus at $9.99/mo	Mac only (Apple silicon, macOS 15+)	iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Tinder; Hinge read-only (beta). No email or LinkedIn	Messages and relationship stats stay on your Mac; AI text goes to the AI provider you choose	Understanding the conversations themselves

• Dex (pricing) is the pick if you used Clay for networking and want ongoing LinkedIn sync with role-change alerts, plus WhatsApp and iMessage sync that’s documented. It costs more and has no free plan. See Dex alternatives for the reverse comparison.
• Monica (pricing) is the pick if you’d rather nothing about your friends sat in a company’s cloud: it’s open source and free to self-host, but everything is typed by hand.
• Tera Chat is the pick if your relationships live in chat apps on a Mac. Unlike Mesh, it reads the conversations themselves (on your Mac, never uploaded to a Tera Chat server) to flag unanswered questions and fading chats and, once AI is set up, to catch life events such as birthdays and new jobs. It has no iPhone app and doesn’t connect to email or LinkedIn, so it doesn’t replace Mesh’s address-book role.

Should you stay with Mesh?

For most former Clay users, yes. The team stayed, there’s a free plan for up to 1,000 contacts, and it gained an Android app. Move if one of these applies: you want deeper LinkedIn and documented WhatsApp sync (Dex), you want your data off someone else’s servers (Monica), or you want a tool that notices what’s happening in your conversations on a Mac (Tera Chat). For the full field, see the best personal CRM apps of 2026, and if the people you’re tracking are friends rather than contacts, our guide to personal CRMs for friends.