Do email verification credits expire?

Expiry exists to make revenue predictable. A balance that disappears converts an open liability into recognized income on a schedule, which is convenient for the vendor and is paid for by the customer who bought ahead.

The cost lands on exactly the buying pattern the pricing encourages. Volume discounts reward buying a large block; expiry punishes you for not consuming it fast enough. Most list cleaning is periodic, so a year-long deadline on a 100,000-credit block is a real constraint.

It also distorts how you use the service. Credits running out in November produce verification runs done because the balance is expiring rather than because the list needed checking.

Read the terms rather than the pricing page. Expiry is usually in the terms of service, and the wording distinguishes between credits that expire and accounts that go dormant, which are different things.

ZapBounce credits never expire. That is a direct response to the two vendors who do, and it costs us nothing except the option of collecting money for work we never performed.

Say you buy 100,000 credits in January from a vendor with a twelve-month expiry, and you pay $400. Your plan is sensible: clean a 20,000-address list once a quarter. By December you've run four cleanups and used 80,000 credits.

In January the last 20,000 vanish. You paid $400 and received 80,000 checks, so your real price was $0.005 an address and not the $0.004 on the pricing page. That's a 25% markup, and it never appears on an invoice.

The volume discount is what led you there. Buying 100,000 at once was cheaper per credit than buying 20,000 four times, so the price list steered you to the big pack. The expiry clause then punished you for not using it fast enough. Without an expiry date, the same purchase is simply a good deal.

Open the vendor's terms and search for four words: expire, forfeit, inactive and dormant. Expiry rules rarely sit on the pricing page, and those words find the clauses that matter.

Check whether a new purchase resets the clock on old credits. Some vendors extend everything when you buy again, which turns expiry into a nudge to keep buying.

Look for a dormancy rule as well. An account that closes after a year without a login can take a never-expiring balance down with it. Read the two clauses together. It's also worth knowing whether unused credits can be refunded, and within how many days.

Bonus and free credits often follow different rules from paid ones. That's true of ours too: the free monthly checks reset each month, and the credits you buy stay until you use them. If a vendor's terms are silent on any of these points, email and ask, and keep the reply.