Case Study

Relevant Software

Filtrat vs Clay Waterfall vs Clearout — 301 leads.
Method: Clay waterfall side-by-side. 1,700+ emails found since.

“The waterfall finds more. Filtrat finds cleaner. We cancelled Clearout.”

“As Head of Sales, I’m grateful our team has access to a product like filtrat. It gives us confidence in our outbound data quality and saves us real money on verification costs. The accuracy we see from filtrat changed how we approach list building.”

Nelia Morozyk

Head of Sales, Relevant Software

“Since the comparison test I’ve run 1,700+ email searches through filtrat via Clay. The process doesn’t break, doesn’t timeout, scales without babysitting. As head of data research that’s what actually matters — uninterrupted list building without paying for every waterfall output from 5 different providers.”

Pavlo Firman

Head of Data Research, Relevant Software

Background

The Setup

The data research team was paying for:

A Clay waterfall with multiple email providers
A Clearout subscription to double-check the waterfall’s results

The question: do we actually need Clearout, or can filtrat handle both finding and verification?

Test: run the same 301 leads through filtrat and the Clay waterfall, then verify both sets through Clearout as a neutral third party.

Detection

Who Found More?

The 95.3% is inflated. 38 of the waterfall’s “found” emails belonged to a different company than the target — wrong domain matched to wrong person. After removing mismatches, the real gap is 82.7% vs 69.8%.

What happened to the waterfall’s 287 “found” emails

Correct match: 249 (87%)

Wrong company: 38 (13%)

Filtrat domain mismatches

Waterfall domain mismatches

38 (13%)

Accuracy

Whose Emails Were Accurate?

Both sets verified by Clearout as neutral third party.

Filtrat’s 210 emails

0.2%

Valid (96.2%)

Catch-all (2.9%)

Invalid (1%)

Result	Count	%
Valid	202	96.2%
Catch-all	6	2.9%
Invalid	2	1%

Waterfall’s 249 emails

92.4%

Valid (92.4%)

Catch-all (6.8%)

Invalid (0.4%)

Unknown (0.4%)

Result	Count	%
Valid	230	92.4%
Catch-all	17	6.8%
Invalid	1	0.4%
Unknown	1	0.4%

Full Funnel

Usable Emails Out of 301 Leads

The waterfall produces more usable emails overall. Filtrat produces fewer but higher-confidence results with zero domain mismatches.

After the Test

What Happened Next

Emails found via Clay since the test

Cancelled Clearout

96.2% accuracy made double-checking unnecessary

Timeouts at scale — no breaks, no babysitting

Summary

Key Numbers

Leads tested	301
Filtrat detection rate	69.8%
Waterfall detection rate (cleaned)	82.7%
Filtrat validation accuracy	96.2%
Waterfall validation accuracy (Clearout)	92.4%
Domain mismatches (waterfall)	38 (13%)
Domain mismatches (filtrat)	0
Emails found via Clay since test	1,700+
Clearout subscription	Cancelled
Timeouts at scale	0

Bottom Line

Takeaway

The waterfall finds more emails. Filtrat finds cleaner ones — zero domain mismatches and higher validation accuracy. The accuracy advantage plus the cost savings made the decision straightforward: cancel Clearout, run filtrat as the primary verification layer, use Clay for orchestration.

1,700+ email searches later, the process hasn’t broken once.

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