What does the `welcome_bonus` transaction type in Credits History mean?

The welcome_bonus row in your Valid Email Checker Credits History is the one-time grant of 200 free credits we deposit when you confirm your email at signup. Every new account that clears our abuse checks gets it. It is the first row in most users' history and the source of those 200 credits sitting in your balance on day one.

What the row contains

A standard welcome_bonus entry looks like this in the table: transaction type "Welcome Bonus", credits_in = 200, credits_out = 0, balance_after = 200 (assuming nothing else happened first), bucket = "payg". The description usually reads something like "Welcome bonus credits for new account". The icon next to the row is a small gift symbol, the same indicator used for other positive grants like manual goodwill credits.

It deposits into the PAYG bucket

The 200 credits land in your Pay-As-You-Go bucket, not Monthly. This means they never expire — sign up today, leave the account untouched for six months, and the 200 credits are still there waiting. See what is the "payg" bucket for how PAYG behaves. The choice of PAYG is deliberate: a Monthly-bucket welcome bonus would reset away with the first cycle and feel like a bait-and-switch.

It appears once per real account

There is exactly one welcome_bonus row per account. We check before inserting to prevent double-credits if anything retries the grant. If you signed up multiple times with the same person behind it (different emails, same device, similar IP), the second account often does not get the bonus — our abuse model catches that pattern and holds the grant pending review. Team members never see this row at all (it would be a leak of the owner's onboarding).

If your account is missing this row

A new account without a welcome_bonus row usually means one of: the account is on abuse-review hold, you already redeemed the bonus on a prior account that our model fingerprinted to you, or the grant call failed transiently. Open the transaction type filter, pick "Welcome Bonus", and confirm the row is missing. If you are a legitimate user and the row is genuinely absent, contact support and we will investigate.