Clearout review

This review reads Clearout on its own published pages, checked in September 2026. It covers what the 99.73% claim measures, how Clearout treats accept-all domains, what its plans cost to reason about, and how to test it on a list you already know.

Assessed on	What Clearout publishes
Accuracy claim	99.73%, a figure about returned verdicts
Accept-all domains	Attempts to resolve them rather than report them as accept-all
How you buy	Pay-as-you-go credits, or monthly and annual plans with up to 20% off
Tier prices	Shown by a calculator on the pricing page
Free allowance	100 credits, no card
Credit life	Credits never expire and roll over; idle discounted credits are held for up to one year
Signup forms	Form Guard checks addresses at the form in real time

Read on clearout.io (pricing page and terms) on 24 September 2026. Tier prices come from a calculator on their page, so this review quotes the model and no Clearout price. Every row can be checked against their current pages.

What 99.73% measures

Clearout's headline is 99.73% accuracy. A figure like that scores the verdicts a vendor gave back. Rows with no verdict, such as servers that never answered, sit outside the sum, so the share of your list that got an answer matters as much as the percentage.

Hunter's benchmark shows the gap. It ran 3,000 real business addresses through 15 verifiers, counted every row, and found scores from 31.2% to 70.0% (3 November 2025). Both kinds of number can be true at once. Our note on why verifiers disagree walks through the arithmetic.

ZapBounce reports two numbers on every file: coverage, the share of your list with a definite verdict, and accuracy on those verdicts. You'll see the unresolved rows counted, with a reason on each one.

How Clearout treats accept-all domains

Clearout's standout is its work on accept-all domains. Where a company server says yes to every recipient, Clearout tries to reach a verdict anyway. That effort is worth most on a B2B list full of company domains, and it touches far less on a list of Gmail and Outlook signups.

Keep one protocol fact in view. An accept-all server answers 250 to a real address and to a random one alike, so any verdict beyond that comes from other signals. ZapBounce proves the case with one random-address probe, returns the row as catch_all, bills it once and stops. The catch-all glossary entry explains the test.

Plans, credits and the calculator

You can buy Clearout credits as you go, or take a monthly or annual plan for up to 20% off. Credits never expire and roll over. Its terms add one detail: discounted credits left idle are held for up to one year. Our Clearout pricing page covers the model line by line.

Tier prices come out of a calculator, so you'll need a browser session to get a figure you can quote. ZapBounce prints every tier on one page: $5 for 1,000, $25 for 10,000 and $139 for 100,000, with unknowns and duplicates never billed. The ladder is on our pricing page.

Form Guard checks an address as someone types it into your form. That catches a typo or a throwaway domain before it lands in your database, which is cheaper than cleaning it out later.

ZapBounce runs the same SMTP check one address at a time through POST /v1/verify, so your form or CRM can call it on submit. Each result carries a did_you_mean typo hint and the literal smtp_code. See real-time verification for the setup.

Testing Clearout on your own list

Pull 1,000 addresses you've already mailed, where you know which ones bounced. Run them through Clearout, and through ZapBounce's 100 free monthly checks plus a $5 pack. Score each tool against your real bounces, then count the rows each one left without a verdict.

For the products side by side, read ZapBounce vs Clearout. Clearout vs ZeroBounce, Clearout alternatives and the comparisons hub cover the wider field.

The scorecard on Clearout

Both columns are required here. A page that only fills one is an advertisement wearing a review's clothes.

Where Clearout is genuinely good

Real effort on accept-all domains, which pays off on lists heavy with company addresses.
100 free credits with no card on file.
Credits never expire and roll over between purchases.
Form Guard checks addresses at the signup form in real time.

Where Clearout falls short

Tier prices come from a calculator, so there's no fixed ladder to paste into a budget.
The 99.73% headline scores returned verdicts, so it can't be set beside a benchmark that counts every address.
Idle discounted credits are held for up to one year under its terms.
A verdict on an accept-all domain rests on signals beyond the SMTP reply, which the server itself never confirms.

What no price list or review settles

What decides the real cost of Clearout

A rate card describes what an address costs to check. It says nothing about the addresses that come back with no verdict. On a genuine B2B list roughly 28% sit on accept-all domains, where the server accepts every recipient by design. No SMTP check resolves those at mailbox level, at any price. ZapBounce returns them as catch_all and tells you the share up front.

Yahoo and AOL accept every recipient probe deliberately, to stop people mapping their users, so those addresses come back unresolved whichever vendor you pay. ZapBounce never bills an unknown, so an unresolved address costs you nothing. Gmail and Microsoft 365 throttle or refuse probes arriving from cloud ranges, for every vendor.

Pristine spam traps are indistinguishable from working mailboxes at the protocol level. No product removes them and none of the figures on this page changes that. Any vendor claiming trap removal is selling you a probability with the word removal attached.

Questions about Clearout

Is Clearout accurate?

Clearout claims 99.73% accuracy (read 24 September 2026), a figure that scores the verdicts it returned. Hunter's benchmark of 3,000 business addresses, dated 3 November 2025, counted every row and put 15 verifiers between 31.2% and 70.0%. Ask any vendor what share of your list got a verdict at all.

Is Clearout legit?

Yes. Clearout is a working email verifier with published terms, 100 free credits and pay-as-you-go, monthly and annual plans. Judge it on your own data: run 1,000 addresses you've already mailed and compare its verdicts with your real bounces.

Can Clearout verify catch-all emails?

Clearout attempts to resolve accept-all domains rather than labelling them. An accept-all server answers yes to every recipient, so a verdict there rests on signals beyond the SMTP reply. ZapBounce returns those rows as catch_all after one random-address probe and bills them once.

Do Clearout credits expire?

Clearout says its credits never expire and roll over, and its terms hold idle discounted credits for up to one year (read 24 September 2026). ZapBounce credits never expire, with no idle clause.

How does Clearout compare with ZapBounce on price?

Clearout's tier prices come from a calculator on its pricing page, so set your own quote beside ZapBounce's published ladder: $5 for 1,000, $25 for 10,000 and $139 for 100,000. ZapBounce never bills an unknown result or a duplicate.

Get a Clearout quote for the volume you cleaned last year, then run the same 1,000 known addresses through ZapBounce's free monthly checks. Compare the bill and the rows left without a verdict.

We publish our own ladder

Every tier on one page, 100 free checks a month with no card, and an unknown result is never billed. Read it beside Clearout’s, which we checked in September 2026.

See our pricing ZapBounce vs Clearout