How billing works

One principle: you pay for answers, not for attempts. Here are the seven rules that follow from it, exactly as the platform applies them.

The seven rules

1. No answer, no charge. A result whose provenance is failed_open, throttled, skipped or suppressed is not billable. We still write a usage row recording that it happened and why — but no credit is deducted.
2. Unknown is free. If we cannot reach a verdict (greylisted, timed out, throttled), the result is unknown and it costs nothing.
3. Catch-all is charged once. A catch-all result is billed a single time, with the evidence attached — never doubled. See Catch-all results.
4. Syntax is always free. The syntax depth never costs anything, for anyone, including anonymous callers on the public checker.
5. Always Clean re-validation is free. Re-validating a record already under management is free and unlimited. Only new records meter.
6. The List Evaluator is free. Scoring the health of a list you already hold costs nothing.
7. The email finder is bundled. Finding an address is included in your subscription, not metered per hit.

What “metered” means

When a check is billable, exactly one credit is deducted for that record: first from your monthly plan allowance, then from any pay-as-you-go credits (which never expire). A bulk job therefore charges fewer credits than it has rows whenever some rows come back unknown or hit one of the free cases above — and the job-completion webhook reports both numbers so you can see the difference.

These rules are enforced in code, not just described here. If a page ever contradicts what your account is actually charged, the running system is right and the page is the bug — tell us and we will fix the page.

Continuous hygiene & “under management”

A record is under management when it belongs to a list with an active hygiene registration. Re-validating a record already under management is free and unlimited (billing rule 5) — you are never charged twice for the same address. Every hygiene re-check still writes a usage row for your audit trail, marked non-billable, whether it was re-probed live or served from a recent cached result. Adding a new record to a registered list meters normally, as does validating a brand-new address. The staleness window that decides when a clean, stable address is re-probed rather than served from cache is configurable (default 7 days); addresses that were risky, catch-all, unknown, or that sit on domains with recent negative signals are always re-probed first.

Note: rule 5 names the Always Clean plan, but the pricing page also offers hygiene on Clean (5,000 validations/month, hygiene lists up to 25,000 records) — a single re-run of a full 25,000-record list would exceed that monthly allowance several times over if hygiene re-checks were metered. VerifAi implements the rules exactly as written (re-checks under management are free on every plan that offers hygiene); reconciling the advertised Clean allowance with that is a pricing decision, not a code change.