What does "Balanced" auto-refill timing do? (5-minute delay)

Balanced is the default auto-refill timing mode in Valid Email Checker and the right pick for most accounts. When your credit balance crosses the threshold, Balanced waits a built-in 5-minute window before firing the refill. Combined with the 1-minute monitoring cron, the actual delay between threshold-crossing and credits landing in your account is typically 5 to 10 minutes.

Why the 5-minute window exists

The window is a deliberate pause between detection and action. It exists because a lot of "oh wait, I did not mean for that to happen" situations resolve themselves in those few minutes — someone on the team manually tops up, the user decides to switch to a larger one-time package, the user decides to pause auto-refill for the rest of the month. With Aggressive timing none of those interventions are possible because the charge has already fired. With Balanced you get a window without giving up much in terms of safety net.

How the delay is actually measured

• The monitoring cron tick detects that your balance dropped to or below the threshold and records the timestamp.
• The system then waits 5 minutes from that recorded timestamp.
• On the next cron tick after the 5-minute window expires, the refill fires and the charge attempt goes through.
• Credits land in your PAYG bucket and a notification confirms what happened.

Because the cron tick runs every minute, the practical delay is 5 to 6 minutes in the happy path. If there is a transient processor issue or a brief queue backup, it can stretch to 8 to 10 minutes; this is still well within the safety margin for most use cases.

When Balanced is the right call

• You verify on a steady but moderate cadence — a few hundred to a few thousand emails a day. The 5-minute window is invisible at that pace.
• You want some manual control — the chance to intervene before money leaves the card, even though you rarely will.
• You share the account with a small team and want a window where someone can stop a refill that was triggered by accident (e.g. a botched test run).
• You are new to auto-refill and want the safest default while you learn the feature.

When Balanced is not enough

If you run a customer-facing verification flow or a high-volume API integration where a 5-minute pause would visibly break things, switch to Aggressive timing. For accounting predictability where you want every refill on a fixed clock, switch to Scheduled timing. For most teams, though, Balanced is the comfortable middle and we leave it as the default for that reason.