Verification for a small business with one list
Small businesses usually have one list, one sending platform and nobody whose job is deliverability. The list grew from a shop counter, a website form and a trade show badge scanner, and nobody has looked at it since.
Most of the advice written for this problem is aimed at people running six-figure sends. At a few thousand contacts the decisions are simpler and the free tier covers more than you would expect.
The cost of a dirty list at small volume is the account, not the money
Sending to two hundred dead addresses costs almost nothing in credits. What it costs is the sending account. Mailchimp, Brevo and Constant Contact all suspend for bounce rates that a stale list produces easily, and getting reinstated takes days you did not plan for.
The second cost is quieter. Once your bounce rate marks you as a sender who does not maintain a list, the mail that does get through starts landing in the promotions tab and then in spam, and the open rate you are looking at stops describing anything real.
A list of three thousand contacts costs $25 to check at our 10,000 tier, with credits left over for the rest of the year.
How the work gets done
The order that matters for small businesses, rather than a generic checklist.
Export what you have
One CSV from whatever platform holds the list. You do not need to tidy it first: duplicates are collapsed before anything is checked and you are never billed for them twice.
Start with the free hundred
A hundred checks a month, no card. Take a sample from the oldest part of your list and see what comes back before deciding whether the whole thing needs doing.
Remove the invalid, keep the rest
Delete what came back invalid. Keep the catch-alls and the unknowns, because neither one is evidence of a bad address, and deleting a real customer to improve a statistic is the wrong trade.
Verify at the form from then on
Once the list is clean, check addresses as they arrive. It stops the problem coming back and it catches the typo that would otherwise cost you a customer who thinks they signed up.
What verification will not do here
What it costs
A hundred free checks a month with no card covers sampling and ongoing form checks for many small lists. A one-off clean of a few thousand contacts is $25 for 10,000 credits, and the unused balance never expires.
Every tier works the same way. Unknown results and duplicates are never billed, and credits do not expire.
Questions we get asked
Is 100 free credits a month enough?
For a form that collects a few addresses a day, yes, indefinitely. For a one-off clean of an existing list, no: buy the smallest pack and keep the remainder.
Do I need this if I only send once a month?
The sending platform does not care how often you send, only what proportion bounces. A monthly send to a stale list trips the same thresholds.
Will this stop my emails going to spam?
It removes one cause. Authentication records, content and whether people asked for the mail all matter too, and verification does not touch any of them.
Try it on your own list first
100 free checks a month, no card. Run a sample and read the unresolved count before you decide anything.