What is the "payg" bucket in my Credits History?

Inside Valid Email Checker, every Credits History row is tagged with a bucket showing the source or destination of those credits. "payg" is the bucket for Pay-As-You-Go — credits from one-time purchases, your 200-credit welcome bonus, and auto-refill top-ups. They never expire.

What "payg" tells you about a row

A row tagged "payg" means the credits in that transaction came from or went to your Pay-As-You-Go pool. PAYG is your never-expire bucket. Credits land here when you buy a PAYG pack from /buy-credits, when the welcome bonus runs at signup, when auto-refill triggers, or when a verification refund returns credit that was originally drawn from PAYG.

When you will see "payg" rows

• PAYG purchases — purchase_payg rows when you buy a credit pack (2k, 5k, 10k, all the way up to 1M).
• Welcome bonus — the welcome_bonus row that lands at signup is tagged "payg" because the 200 free credits are deposited into PAYG.
• Auto-refill — auto_refill rows when your balance dropped below your threshold and we topped up automatically.
• Verifications drawn from PAYG — single, bulk, and API verification rows whenever VEC reached past an empty Monthly bucket and drew from PAYG.
• Refunds returning to PAYG — Unknown auto-refunds and goodwill refunds against PAYG-originated credits.

Why PAYG drains last

PAYG credits sit in your account indefinitely (see do credits expire). Monthly credits reset every cycle. VEC drains Monthly first so your unused subscription credits do not expire before you spend them — see why monthly gets used first. The result: if you have both buckets active, you will see Monthly rows accumulate before PAYG rows start showing up.

For PAYG-only users, the bucket is all you ever see

If you have never had a Monthly subscription, every row in your Credits History will be tagged "payg" — purchases, verifications, refunds, all of it. That is fine. The bucket column is most informative for hybrid accounts where you can see Monthly and PAYG rows side by side, but for PAYG-only users it is essentially a constant.