Kickbox and Hunter both expire credits after twelve months. That is disclosed and it is legal and it changes the arithmetic of every price comparison involving them.
Buy 100,000 credits, use 60,000 in the year, and you paid the headline rate for 100,000 and received 60,000 checks. The effective per-address price is two-thirds higher than the number on the pricing page, and no comparison table anywhere reflects that.
List cleaning is lumpy work. You verify before a big campaign, before a migration, after acquiring a list. Those events do not arrive on a monthly schedule, which is exactly why an annual expiry catches people.
Our credits do not expire. Bouncer, Emailable, DeBounce, EmailListVerify and Reoon all take the same position, so this is a majority behavior in the market rather than a bold stand.
What to check on a pricing page
Whether credits expire, and after how long. It is usually in the terms rather than on the pricing table.
Whether subscription credits roll over. Some vendors distinguish pay-as-you-go credits, which never expire, from subscription credits, which roll for a month or two and then vanish.
Whether unknowns and duplicates are billed, because that changes the number of credits a 10,000-row file actually consumes.
Whether there is a minimum purchase. ZeroBounce's entry is $39 for a 2,000-credit minimum, which is a different shape of commitment from buying 1,000 for $5.
Where this argument costs us something
The short version
- Read the expiry terms before comparing per-address rates.
- Work out your realistic annual usage rather than buying for a peak month.
- Check whether pay-as-you-go and subscription credits are treated differently by the same vendor.
The same 100,000 credits on two calendars
Take our own price table and imagine it with a twelve-month clock attached. Say you buy 100,000 credits in January for $139, clean a 60,000-row list in February, and plan to spend the rest on a migration in the autumn. The migration slips to the following March, fourteen months after the purchase.
On the clock, the 40,000 leftover credits lapsed in January. Your February job really cost $0.0023 an address instead of the $0.00139 on the pricing page, and the March job needs a fresh 50,000 pack at $89. Without a clock, March costs nothing new. Same buyer, same lists, same price table: $228 on one calendar and $139 on the other.
The gap widens as your work gets less predictable. An agency that cleans lists whenever a client signs can't forecast volume at all, so it buys small packs at the worst per-address rate to avoid stranding credits. That cost never shows up as a lapsed balance.
What a no-expiry promise covers, and what it doesn't
Ours covers purchased pay-as-you-go credits. The balance has no date attached, and the credits endpoint returns expires_at as null so your own tooling can confirm it. The free monthly allowance is different. Those 100 checks reset on the first of each month and don't roll over, which is why the API reports them in a separate field from your paid balance.
When you compare vendors, ask these questions in writing. Does a purchased credit ever lapse, and what starts the clock: the purchase, the last login or the last use? Are credits that come with a subscription handled the same way as credits bought outright? If the account sits idle for a year, is the balance still there? Terms can tie a balance to account activity instead of a purchase date, which reads as no expiry on the pricing table and behaves like expiry for buyers whose work is lumpy.
Questions people ask
Which verifiers expire credits?
Kickbox and Hunter both operate a twelve-month expiry as of September 2026. Several others distinguish pay-as-you-go from subscription credits, with different rules for each.
Do your credits expire?
No. A balance bought today is still there next year, which suits the lumpy way list cleaning actually happens.