Since I started getting hands-on with GTM Engineering tools, I've noticed a quiet revolution happening among practitioners: people are ditching paid tools for their own self-built stack.
It's not surprising to see this happening in a field facing the same shift as so many others, but I wanted to gather data to see how deep in this process GTM professionals actually are.
So I decided to do some field work.
The experiment and the data
I used AI agents to pull the last 1.000 threads from the subreddit r/gtmengineering, where seasoned (as experienced as one can get in such a new field) and aspiring professionals share tools and knowledge about GTME. Among the data, another agent coded every post against a set of recurring topic markers and engagement to size relevance.
Enough said, here's what came out of it.
Finding #1: 40%+ of the discussion is shared between two topics only - outbound and Clay
Outbound troubleshooting (cold email and LinkedIn combined) is the largest single activity in the dataset, close to a quarter of all threads. Most of it circles the same themes: which sequencer still avoids spam filters, which automation tool hasn't gotten an account flagged this month.
Sitting behind outbound is a single tool. Clay is named in 154 threads, more than any other tool (and almost none of that volume is neutral).
Here's the full ranking of common themes:
Finding #2: Clay is the community's shared villain as much as its shared default
The clearest trend in this dataset isn't a competitor displacing Clay, it's GTM engineers routing around it entirely.
Claude and Claude Code appear in roughly one in ten threads, often pointed as a working substitute for enrichment, scoring, and outbound tooling the community used to buy from someone else.
"I used Clay for over a year. Built complex tables. Waited for waterfall enrichments to finish. Watched credits drain. Rebuilt tables when they broke halfway through a 50k-row enrichment because one API in the chain timed out. At some point I asked myself: what is Clay actually doing here?"
From a thread describing a Supabase + Google Sheets + Claude Code replacement for Clay.
Reading through threads my takeaways are 2:
- The lack of transparent pricing is an open wound.
- Clay is competing with the professionals they created themselves.
Finding #3: GTM Engineers share common beliefs and their hottest take is companies have no clue of what they are looking after as they recruit
When ranking thread relevance by upvotes and by replies, the dataset surfaces almost entirely different worlds.
- 75How we're personalising cold emails at scale in 2026
- 723 Months as a GTM Engineer
- 70Open-sourced our GTM setup as a Claude Code skillset (8 of the best APIs, no subscription)
- 69Supabase + Google Sheets + Claude Code replaced Clay for me
- 64I'll teach you everything I know about GTM engineering. For free.
- 101I built a Google Maps scraper: 100,000+ validated business emails
- 88GTM hype gonna be dead soon
- 85Clay charges over $300/mo for this..
- 81Which LinkedIn outreach automation tools are actually working in 2026?
- 66Top GTM Tools
The two lists barely overlap.
Upvotes favors detailed tutorials, free teaching, and confident predictions about the role.
Replies count favors live troubleshooting with no settled answer.
On the generosity side, GTM Engineers highlight how the route to mastering this role is building in public, not getting credentialed. No top-voted beginner reply cites a course or certification. Process fundamentals, one end-to-end build, and a public log of it outweigh any tool checklist.
Among the most-discussed threads, vague job specs and inflated year requirements for a two-year-old title read as a red flag to the community.