Clay is now Mesh. What happened, and what to do
Clay (clay.earth) was acquired by Automattic and is now Mesh. What changed, what did not, and your options if you want to move your contacts.
Ava Yu
Co-Founder of Wend ·
If you typed clay.earth into your browser recently and landed somewhere unexpected, you’re not alone. “What happened to Clay?” has become one of the most common questions in the personal-CRM world. The short answer: Clay is now Mesh. Nothing shut down; the product changed name and owner.
Disclosure, before anything else: this explainer is published by Wend, a product in the same category as Clay/Mesh. We’ve kept the facts neutral and hedged, and the “your options” section below includes staying with Mesh as a perfectly good choice.
Correction, 2 September 2026: when this post was published in July it priced Wend as a free tier plus a paid tier above it, and said unpaid accounts were metered at ten agent captures a month. That was true then and none of it is true now. Wend is one plan, $29 a month or $290 a year, with no free tier and no trial, and capture is not metered at all. The pricing paragraph below has been rewritten to say so. Everything about Clay and Mesh is unchanged.
The timeline
Clay launched as a beautifully designed personal-network app: an address book that kept itself current by syncing contact details, job changes, and social profiles from your connected accounts. It earned a devoted following for its polish, especially among people who’d bounced off heavier CRMs.
In June 2025, Automattic acquired Clay. Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Day One: a large, established owner with a track record of running consumer products long-term. On 25 March 2026 the product rebranded to Mesh, moving to the domain me.sh. Today clay.earth redirects there, and the iOS listing still reads “Formerly known as Clay, same app, new name”, published by Clay Software, Inc. The team sits in Automattic’s Other Bets division alongside Beeper. One practical tell of how thinly that division is staffed: 15 months after the acquisition there is still no Android app.
What actually changed (and what didn’t)
Changed: the name, the domain, and the ownership. Marketing, support channels, and integrations now speak “Mesh,” which is why older reviews, comparison articles, and app-store listings that say “Clay” can feel confusing. They describe the same product.
Not changed (as far as public information shows, checked August 2026): the core product idea. Mesh remains what Clay was, a design-forward, auto-updating personal address book. Existing accounts and data carried over. If you loved Clay, Mesh is still that app, now with a larger company behind it.
The question the category is now facing
Worth naming, because it changes how you should evaluate any of these tools in 2026: the assistant you already use has become the place you ask questions. Anyone can now stand up a simple app in an afternoon, but nobody can generate a relationship, or the years of context behind one. Which means the interesting question about a personal CRM is no longer “is the app nice?” It’s can your AI read this memory, and can you trust what it writes back?
A classic address book answers neither. It is a destination you visit. The tools that survive the next few years are the ones your agent can query directly, with governance on every write, because when several agents write into one memory, the rules about who approved what stop being a settings page and become the product.
Your options as a Clay user
An acquisition plus a rebrand is a natural moment to re-evaluate, not because anything is wrong, but because your needs may have drifted since you first signed up. Honestly laid out, starting with the option we’d argue for (and yes, it’s ours):
1. Upgrade to the AI-native approach, our pick. We have a horse in this race, so plainly: our product, Wend, does the job neither Clay nor Mesh attempts, and it does it somewhere neither of them lives. Wend is not an app you open. It is memory that sits underneath the assistant you already use: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and Claude Code read it and propose to it through an MCP connector, which means there is no second app and no new habit, because the habit already exists. What it holds is not just who someone is but what happened between you. It fills a relationship graph from live Gmail and Google Calendar sync (with permission), records a source on every fact, tracks what you promised, answers questions like “who do I know in fintech?” or “how am I connected to her?”, and drafts your follow-ups from real history rather than a templated first name. If the rebrand has you re-evaluating anyway, this is the moment to fix the deeper problem: a contact list that’s fresh but empty of memory. Here’s our honest Wend-vs-Mesh comparison.
What it costs, plainly, as of September 2026: one plan, $29 a month or $290 a year, the same price whether you keep 500 people or 10,000. There is no free tier and no trial. The flat price holds at any size because the one genuinely per-person cost, public-web research, runs on a data-provider account you hold yourself, so network size never changes the bill. Storage is never the meter either, because storage is not the expensive part: a person occupies about twenty kilobytes. Capture is not metered at all. What the subscription buys is the agent work: your own assistant asking the graph questions through the MCP connector, capturing into it automatically, and acting on your behalf. Stop paying and that stops, but nothing is deleted. The graph stays on your Mac, readable and exportable, which is the part we think a memory tool owes you. Wend is in invite-gated early access while Google production verification finishes, so the way in today is the waitlist, and invites go out a group at a time.
2. Stay with Mesh. The simplest option: same product, and Automattic’s backing arguably answers the “will this small startup survive?” question better than before. If an auto-updating, gorgeous address book is truly all you want, there’s no urgent reason to move. Two details worth knowing: the free plan is capped at 1,000 contacts and requires a credit card, which they say filters out illegitimate users, and the MCP server reads and writes with no approval step we could find in their published documentation (checked August 2026).
3. Move to a manual personal CRM with strong reminders. If what you actually missed in Clay was follow-up discipline, the keep-in-touch cadences, notes, and promises, then Dex is the established pick (about $12/mo billed annually, checked August 2026). Know two things before you switch: Dex removed its free tier in March 2023, so there is no way to land softly, and its 47 MCP tools all commit directly, so an assistant connected to it writes to your contacts with no review step. You trade automatic contact freshness for a system built around acting on relationships.
4. Go open-source. If the acquisition made you want full ownership of your relationship data, Monica HQ is open-source and free to self-host: deliberately manual, fully yours. For what it’s worth, we took the same position on the part that matters most to us. Wend’s engine, the graph schema and the write path that governs it, is public under AGPLv3 as wend-core, so the claims in this paragraph are checkable in code rather than on a marketing page.
Whichever way you lean, do one thing first: export your contacts to CSV. Every tool above (including Mesh itself, and Wend) imports CSV, and having your own copy keeps every option open.
Quick answers
What happened to Clay (clay.earth)? Clay was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Tumblr, in June 2025, and has since rebranded to Mesh, at me.sh. The product continues under the new name.
Is Clay shutting down? No. Clay didn't shut down. It changed name and ownership. The app formerly at clay.earth now lives on as Mesh (me.sh) under Automattic.
Is Mesh the same product as Clay? Yes, same product lineage: a design-forward personal address book that auto-updates contact details from your connected accounts. Reviews and guides written about Clay before 2026 describe the same underlying app.
Do I need to do anything as a Clay user? For most users, nothing. Accounts and data carried over to the Mesh brand. If you're re-evaluating after the acquisition, export your contacts to CSV first so your options stay open.
What are the best alternatives to Clay / Mesh? If you want the same auto-updating address book, staying with Mesh is the simplest option, though note its free plan asks for a credit card. The strongest upgrade, disclosed plainly as our own product, is Wend: relationship memory that lives outside any one assistant and works inside the one you already use, fills itself from your email and calendar, captures what happened in your conversations rather than only who someone is, records a source on every fact, and turns every agent write into a proposal you approve. One plan at a flat $29/mo ($290/yr) at any network size, with no free tier and no trial. For manual control with reminders, Dex, about $12/mo billed annually, with no free plan since March 2023. For open source and self-hosting, Monica HQ, which has been close to dormant since May 2024. All checked August 2026.
Can any of these work inside ChatGPT or Claude? This is the real 2026 dividing line. A classic personal CRM is a destination: you open the app to get value out of it. Wend ships an MCP connector, so Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, and Claude Code can read your relationship graph and propose additions to it without you opening Wend at all. Every proposal an agent makes waits for your confirmation, and Wend's engine is open source (AGPLv3) so the write path is auditable.
More comparisons
We keep an honest, regularly updated set of comparisons for this category: the 9 best personal CRMs in 2026, Mesh alternatives, and Dex vs Mesh.