tl;dr: Would building an open-source version of Clay's orchestration layer that uses your own models or LLM API keys be useful?

Hey all. I'm a data platform engineer, not a GTM person. But recently I was poking at Clay's free tier for a personal project. I wanted to enhance some data with Claygents but ran out of credits after a few dozen rows. Continuing was $167/mo, or $495/mo to automate it via webhooks, which felt like a big ask for what was mostly orchestrating model calls.

GTM data engineers at my previous company described a similar pain: they paid hundreds of thousands a month to orchestrate their enrichment waterfalls, even though the model calls went to their own Claude account, which they already paid for per call.

When I looked for alternatives, the hosted ones still priced on credits, and the open-source ones were either CLI tools you drive from Claude Code or templates built to showcase another platform.

I'm personally into building open-source alternatives to expensive SaaS for the same reason Tobi at Shopify talks about arming the rebels. Every cost in your stack limits a builder's ability to bootstrap their idea and is just another hurdle when competing against well-funded companies. This feels like a space where a quality open-source option could make a difference.

Before I dig deeper, I'd love to hear from people who do this every day. What would an open-source version need before you'd switch to it, and is there any reason it isn't worth building?