Which auto-refill timing mode should I choose? (Aggressive / Balanced / Scheduled)

Auto-refill in Valid Email Checker has three timing modes that decide how quickly a refill actually fires once your balance crosses the threshold. The threshold answers "when does the refill become eligible." The timing mode answers "how quickly does it then run." Picking the right mode is mostly about how much risk of mid-job pause you can tolerate versus how much warning time you want before money leaves your card.

The three modes at a glance

How to decide

If your work depends on credits being available the second they are needed — a verification webhook that fires every few seconds, a Zapier automation, a customer-facing form that verifies on submit — pick Aggressive. The refill lands within a minute of the threshold being hit, and you almost never see a stall.

If you sometimes want a chance to intervene before a refill goes through (maybe you would rather buy a larger one-off package, or pause auto-refill for the rest of the month), pick Balanced. The 5-minute delay is enough for you to see the notification, log in, and stop the refill if you want.

If you have an accounting reason to want every refill at the same wall-clock time — for example, you reconcile credit purchases against a daily report at 9:00 AM and want every refill timestamped right before that — pick Scheduled. The trade-off is that if the balance crosses the threshold at 10 AM and you scheduled refills for 2 AM, you have a 16-hour window where the balance keeps dropping.

You can change modes at any time

Click the Auto-Refill toggle (or the settings gear next to it) to reopen the modal, pick a different timing mode in the radio group, and save. The change takes effect immediately — the next eligible refill follows the new schedule. The full auto-refill setup guide walks through the modal UI in detail, and you can change modes as many times as you want without penalty.

A pragmatic approach: start on Balanced for the first month while you get a feel for how often refills fire under your real workload, then escalate to Aggressive if you ever experience a stall during a campaign, or drop down to Scheduled if your finance team asks for predictable charge timing. There is no single right answer — the modes exist because real accounts have different operational shapes, and the toggle is built to let you adjust as you learn.

What the mode does not change

The timing mode only affects when a refill fires once the threshold is crossed. It does not change the threshold itself, the refill amount, the monthly limit, or which card gets charged. Those are independent settings in the same modal. So switching from Balanced to Aggressive does not somehow refill you more often or for larger amounts — it just shaves a few minutes off the response time when a refill is already going to happen.