Is ZapBounce more accurate than Clearout?

Compare coverage before accuracy. Clearout states 99.73%. Vendor accuracy claims in this market are calculated after unknown and catch-all addresses leave the denominator. ZapBounce reports coverage, the share of the list with a definite verdict, so the rest is visible, labeled and never billed.

Why switch from Clearout to ZapBounce?

A published price. ZapBounce's ladder runs from $5 for 1,000 to $949 for a million on one page. Clearout's figures come out of a calculator. Coverage beside every result. Their 99.73% is a claim about returned verdicts; ZapBounce reports what share of the list reached one. Catch-all rows are labeled catch_all, with the SMTP code the server gave, so the call on how to mail a domain that accepts everything stays with you. Credits carry no date at all, whether you bought them at a discount or not. A free allowance that renews: 100 credits each month, with no card on file.

ZapBounce vs Clearout

Clearout attacks the hardest part of this problem directly, attempting to resolve accept-all domains rather than labeling them. The question this page asks is whether your list is the kind that work pays off on, and what you pay for the rest of the file. ZapBounce answers the second part on a public ladder: $25 for 10,000 and $139 for 100,000.

	ZapBounce	Clearout
Accuracy reporting	Coverage stated: the share of your list with a definite verdict	99.73%
1,000 addresses	$5	Not listed on the pricing page
10,000 addresses	$25	Not listed
100,000 addresses	$139	Not listed
Free tier	100 a month, no card	100 credits, no card
Credit expiry	Never	Credits never expire and roll over
Billed for unknowns	No	No

Clearout figures read from their own pricing page in September 2026.

How Clearout prices it

Clearout sells pay-as-you-go credits plus monthly and annual plans, with up to 20% off on a subscription (read 24 September 2026). Its credits never expire, though its terms cap discounted credits at one year idle. ZapBounce credits carry no date at all, and a monthly plan costs 15% less than the same credits pay-as-you-go.

Why teams pick ZapBounce over Clearout

What changes when your list runs through ZapBounce instead.

The short version

A published price. ZapBounce's ladder runs from $5 for 1,000 to $949 for a million on one page. Clearout's figures come out of a calculator.
Coverage beside every result. Their 99.73% is a claim about returned verdicts; ZapBounce reports what share of the list reached one.
Catch-all rows are labeled catch_all, with the SMTP code the server gave, so the call on how to mail a domain that accepts everything stays with you.
Credits carry no date at all, whether you bought them at a discount or not.
A free allowance that renews: 100 credits each month, with no card on file.

Moving off Clearout

A price you can quote without a calculator. Clearout's per-address figures come out of a calculator on its pricing page, across pay-as-you-go, monthly and annual plans. Teams building a budget want a table they can paste into a spreadsheet, and ZapBounce's ladder is that table: $25 for 10,000 and $139 for 100,000.

Clearout reports catch-all as its own status and returns unknown credits automatically. ZapBounce follows both rules: catch_all is one probe and one credit, and unknown is never billed. Map any rule built on Clearout's Deep Verify output to our four results before your first upload, and move each form check to a POST /v1/verify call.

The hard addresses, and how they come back

Catch-alls, Yahoo, cloud blocks and traps

Clearout goes further into accept-all domains than most of this field, and it is worth being precise about what that means. A server that accepts every recipient by design cannot be made to confess at the protocol level. Any resolution beyond that is inference from other signals, and inference is not the same as a verdict.

Form Guard checks addresses at your signup form in real time, which catches a typo before it enters the database. It cannot tell you whether the person will ever open the mailbox.

Yahoo and AOL return a success code for every recipient, sent deliberately to defeat harvesting. Gmail and Microsoft 365 throttle or refuse probes from cloud addresses. ZapBounce returns what those servers will not settle as unknown, with the reason attached, and never bills it.

A pristine spam trap answers a delivery attempt exactly as a real mailbox does, so no verifier detects one, and no resolution technique changes that.

Questions people ask about Clearout

Does Clearout's catch-all resolution earn its price?

It depends entirely on your domain mix. Export your list, count the addresses on accept-all domains, and look at the share. On a list that is mostly Gmail and Outlook, the answer is usually no. On a real B2B list it can be the most valuable thing you buy.

What does ZapBounce return on a catch-all address?

The result catch_all with the reason CATCH_ALL. It means the server accepted the real address and a random one at the same domain, so no SMTP check can confirm the mailbox. You see every such row and decide how to mail them.

What is missing from the 99.73% claim?

The share of the test list that produced a definitive verdict. Once you know that, the percentage tells you something useful. Without it, it describes the addresses that were never hard.

Is ZapBounce cheaper than Clearout?

At 100,000 addresses we list $139 and they list Not listed. Compare the per-address rate rather than the headline, and check what each side does with unknowns: ours are never billed.

Can I test both before deciding?

Yes, and you should. Run the same sample of a few thousand addresses through each and compare how many came back unresolved. That difference matters more than either accuracy claim.

Count the accept-all domains in your own list before deciding. That single number settles this comparison better than either of our claims.

Run the same sample through us and Clearout

100 free checks a month, no card, and the unknowns come back labeled.

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