- Verification credit, defined
- A verification credit is the unit a verifier bills in, normally one credit per address checked, and the terms that matter are what counts as a check and whether unused credits expire.
Read three terms before the price. Do unknown results consume a credit, are duplicates charged, and do the credits expire. Those three decide what a thousand credits actually buys.
Expiry is where the industry splits. Kickbox and Hunter both expire credits at twelve months. Bouncer, Reoon, Emailable and others do not, and expiry is increasingly read as a legacy practice.
Charging for unknowns is the subtler cost. On a B2B list the unknown share can be substantial, and a vendor that bills for it is charging you for the answers it could not produce.
Prepaid balances suit lumpy work, which most list cleaning is. A subscription priced on monthly volume usually loses money for anyone who verifies quarterly.
How ZapBounce reports it
One credit buys one definitive result on one distinct address: valid, invalid and catch_all each consume one, and unknown, duplicates, errors and sandbox calls never do. Credits never expire. Our pay-as-you-go pricing runs from $5 for 1,000 to $949 for 1,000,000, with 100 free credits a month and no card required.
Pricing the answer instead of the credit
Say you're comparing two verifiers for a 10,000-row file. Vendor A charges $22 for 10,000 credits and bills every row submitted. ZapBounce charges $25 and doesn't bill duplicates or unknowns. On the sticker, A is 12% cheaper.
Now run the file. It holds 800 duplicates, so 9,200 unique addresses, and 1,100 of those come back unknown. Either way you end up with 8,100 usable verdicts.
With Vendor A you've spent all 10,000 credits, so each usable answer cost $22 divided by 8,100, about $0.0027. On ZapBounce you've spent 8,100 credits, worth $20.25, and 1,900 credits remain on the account for next time. Each answer cost $0.0025. The cheaper credit turned out to be the dearer answer, and the gap widens as the unknown share rises, which it does on B2B lists.
What an expiry date costs a quarterly cleaner
Volume discounts push you toward big blocks, and expiry punishes you for buying them. Say you clean 15,000 addresses every quarter, 60,000 a year. A 100,000-credit block at $139 works out far cheaper per address than four separate purchases, so you buy it.
Under a 12-month expiry, the 40,000 credits you haven't used by the anniversary vanish. That's $55.60 of what you paid, and your real price per address was $0.0023, not the $0.00139 on the pricing page. With credits that never expire, the same block simply lasts you 20 months.
A recurring free allowance changes small-volume math in a similar way. ZapBounce's free tier is 100 credits every month with no card, where a one-time free tier is used up in your first test. If you only need to spot-check a few dozen signups a month, you may never need to buy anything.
Whichever vendor's page you're reading, find the definitions before you compare the numbers: what counts as a billable check, and what happens to a balance over time.
Verification credit: common questions
Do ZapBounce credits expire?
No. Credits you buy stay on the account. Expiry at twelve months is a common industry practice we chose not to adopt.
Am I charged for unknown results?
No. If we could not reach a verdict, there is nothing to bill for, and the result says so plainly.
How much does 10,000 credits cost?
$25, which is $0.0025 an address. Larger blocks fall to $0.00095 at a million.