The thing nobody tells you about verification pricing
Most email verifiers charge you per address submitted. Upload 100,000 addresses, pay for 100,000 checks — regardless of how many of those checks actually produced a usable answer. On a typical list, a meaningful slice come back unknown: greylisted servers, timeouts, temporary deferrals, addresses the receiving mail server simply refused to commit on.
You paid for those. You learned nothing from them. That always struck us as backwards.
Our rule, in one line
A credit is consumed only when we return a definitive verdict. Valid, invalid, catch-all, disposable — answers you can act on. If the protocol won’t give us a real answer and we have to return unknown, that lookup is free. And every account gets 100 free credits every month.
Why we can afford to do this
It would be easy to read this as a discount. It isn’t — it’s an incentive structure. If we charged for “unknown,” we’d have a quiet financial reason to give up early: time out faster, retry less, call things inconclusive and move on. Every one of those shortcuts would bill you.
By making unknowns free, the incentive flips. The only way we earn a credit is by working the address hard enough to reach a real verdict — completing the SMTP conversation, handling greylisting with a retry, distinguishing a true catch-all from a slow server. Our margin and your data quality now point in the same direction.
What counts as “definitive”
To keep it concrete, here’s what does and doesn’t cost a credit:
- Charged: valid, invalid, catch-all, do-not-mail (disposable / known-bad).
- Free: unknown / inconclusive results. Every account also gets 100 free credits every month.
The playground goes a step further — it runs the full pipeline on any address with no credits at all, so you can see exactly how we’d classify your own data before you ever pay.
The honest caveat
We’re a newer, smaller service than the decade-old incumbents, and we’ll say so plainly. We run a single prober IP today, so very large lists process more slowly than on services with a rotating pool, and we don’t have the proprietary spam-trap datasets the biggest vendors have spent years accumulating. What we can promise is a clean API, fair billing, and a verdict set that never pretends to know something it can’t. If that trade is right for you, the pricing is built to match.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is an “unknown” result?
A check that couldn’t reach a definitive answer — usually because the receiving server greylisted us, timed out, or deferred the probe. It’s not the same as “invalid.” We return it honestly and don’t bill for it.
How are credits charged when I re-verify an address?
One credit per address each time you validate it — every separate request or list spends a credit on a definitive verdict. “Unknown” results are always free, and every account gets 100 free credits every month. The free playground uses no credits at all.