Can I monitor API usage from the dashboard?

Yes — the Valid Email Checker dashboard gives you several surfaces for tracking what your API integration is doing, who is consuming credits, and where the spend is going. There is no real-time chart yet (that is on the roadmap), but the underlying ledger is exhaustive: every API request is recorded with its endpoint, key, timestamp, credit cost, and per-bucket deduction breakdown.

Surface 1: Per-key Credits Used column

On the Developer page, the Your API Keys table includes a Credits Used column showing the cumulative credit consumption for each key since it was created. This is the fastest way to see which integration is burning the most credits — sort by that column, and the heavy spenders rise to the top. If you maintain one key per environment or per integration (see how many keys can I have), the column doubles as a per-environment cost report.

Surface 2: Credits History (full ledger)

The Credits History page in the dashboard sidebar lists every credit-changing event on your account in reverse chronological order — top-ups, refunds, dashboard verifications, and API requests. API-specific entries appear with these types:

• verify_single_api — one row per /verify-single call that succeeded (or 0-credit row if it returned unknown and got refunded).
• verify_bulk_api — one row per bulk task creation, with the total credit cost folded into the entry.
• refund_api — when a verification was inconclusive and credits were given back.

Each row shows the email or task name, the credit amount, which bucket(s) the credits came from (monthly, rollover, PAYG), and the exact UTC timestamp. Click a row to expand the per-bucket breakdown.

Surface 3: Last Used timestamp on each key

The Developer page also tracks last_used_at for each API key — updated every time the key successfully authenticates a request. The column is not visible in the default table view but appears in the key detail pane and as a tooltip on hover. Use it to spot stale keys (no traffic in 30+ days) that may be safe to disable.

Surface 4: Account total at the top of every page

The credit-balance widget in the dashboard sidebar shows your current total across all buckets, with a breakdown on click. Refreshes whenever you navigate, and updates within seconds after an API request completes. Pair it with the Credits History timeline if you want to verify that an integration ran during a specific window.

What is not yet available

Tracking usage outside the dashboard

If you need usage tracking inside your own observability stack, the cheapest approach is to log every API response on your side. Each /verify-single response includes credits_used: 1 (or 0 on refund) and a verified_at ISO timestamp. Feed that into your existing metrics pipeline alongside the API key ID you used, and you have a per-key usage time series locally without polling the dashboard.

// After every successful call, emit a metric your monitoring stack ingests
const result = await response.json();
metrics.increment('vec.api.credits_used', result.credits_used || 0, {
  key_name: 'production-signup-form',
  endpoint: 'verify-single',
  status: result.status,
});

Alerting on usage anomalies

Combining the dashboard ledger with auto-refill thresholds gives you a usable safety net. Set auto-refill to trigger at 500 credits, top up by 5,000 each time, and configure your monitoring stack to alert whenever the monthly auto-refill count exceeds a baseline. A sudden spike usually means an integration started looping or a new caller showed up unannounced.

Next steps