When does Valid Email Checker NOT refund a verification?

Valid Email Checker refunds individual verification credits only when the engine cannot return a definitive answer — the Unknown status. Every other status, including the ones people sometimes wish were free, costs the credit they consumed. This is grounded in the policy that you pay for the work the verifier did, not for the verdict you hoped it would return.

The full set of statuses that DO cost a credit

Each of these represents a successful verification — the engine made a determination and that determination is useful for your sending decisions:

• Safe — mailbox accepts mail. You got a clean Yes.
• Risky — deliverable but with caveats. Useful for segmentation.
• Invalid — mailbox does not exist or domain is broken. Useful for list cleaning.
• Disabled — mailbox is deactivated. Useful — bounces in the wild.
• Inbox Full — temporary signal worth holding back from.
• Catch-All — domain accepts everything; the address may or may not exist. The engine completed an SMTP probe and found a catch-all configuration. See are catch-all results eligible for refund.
• Disposable — throwaway mailbox. The disposable lookup ran and matched.
• Role — info@, sales@, etc. A real verdict, just one many senders want to suppress.
• Spam Trap — high-risk known trap. See are spam-trap results eligible for refund — detecting these is one of the most valuable things VEC does.

Why "I do not like the verdict" is not a refund reason

When the engine returns Risky, Catch-All, or Role, you know something useful that you did not know before. The verifier ran SMTP probes, DNS lookups, and provider checks. Those operations cost VEC real money on the upstream provider side regardless of the verdict colour. Refunding the credit because the verdict happened to land in a column you wanted to discard would be refunding the cost of the work, not the work itself.

The few cases where we DO refund beyond Unknown

• A documented platform outage on our side that prevented you from getting any verdict for credits you already paid for.
• A duplicate Stripe charge on the same invoice.
• A subscription renewal billed after a confirmed cancellation.
• Compensation credits for a confirmed service failure (case-by-case at admin discretion).

All four of those are reviewed through the refund inquiry form and follow the refund policy at the case-by-case discretion level. Outside of those situations and Unknown auto-refunds, paid credits are final.