What does "Scheduled" auto-refill timing do?

Scheduled is the third auto-refill timing mode in Valid Email Checker. Where Aggressive fires immediately and Balanced waits 5 minutes, Scheduled waits until a specific time of day that you pick — say 2:00 AM local time, or 9:00 AM, whatever you choose. The refill does not fire when your balance crosses the threshold; it fires the next time the clock hits your scheduled hour.

How the scheduling actually works

When you pick Scheduled in the settings modal, an additional time-picker field appears. You enter a 24-hour local time (HH:MM). VEC converts that to UTC under the hood for storage, then converts back to your local clock whenever the modal reopens. The monitoring cron compares the current UTC clock to your stored UTC trigger time on every tick. When the current time matches your scheduled window and your balance is at or below the threshold, the refill fires.

The trade-off Scheduled makes

Scheduled is the slowest of the three modes by design. If your balance crosses the threshold at 10:00 AM and your scheduled time is 2:00 AM the next day, you have a 16-hour window where the balance keeps dropping with no refill. For most users that is too long to tolerate. The mode exists for a narrow set of cases where same-time-every-day billing matters more than speed of response.

When Scheduled is the right call

• You reconcile credit purchases against a daily accounting report and want every refill timestamped at the same hour for predictability.
• Your finance team has a process that runs at a specific time and you want the refill to land before or after that window deterministically.
• You run overnight batch jobs that consume a large chunk of credits in the small hours, and you want the refill timed to land just before those jobs kick off.
• You are part of an enterprise compliance flow where every automated charge needs to land in a predictable window for audit purposes.

Risks to keep in mind

Because Scheduled introduces a potentially long delay between threshold-crossing and refill, you should set your threshold higher than you would on Balanced or Aggressive. If you scheduled the refill for 2:00 AM and your typical daily consumption is 3,000 credits, a threshold of 2,000 is dangerous — you could hit zero hours before the scheduled refill. Push the threshold to something like 5,000 or 6,000 to give yourself enough runway.

Switching away from Scheduled

If Scheduled turns out to be a poor fit (most users discover this after their first close call), switch to Balanced timing or Aggressive. The change takes effect immediately and the next eligible refill follows the new schedule. There is no penalty for switching modes mid-month.