Why didn't auto-refill trigger when my credits ran out?

If your Valid Email Checker credit balance hit zero and auto-refill never fired, something stopped the safety net from working. Walking through five common causes in order is the fastest way to find which one applies. Most of them are immediately obvious once you check the right place; one is a configuration mistake that took practice to debug.

Cause 1: auto-refill was not actually enabled

The single most common cause. Check the Auto-Refill toggle in the dashboard header. If it is grey (off), the safety net was never armed. Maybe you configured the settings but never flipped the master toggle on, or maybe a previous suspension turned it off and you did not notice. Re-enable via the steps in what is auto-refill and where do I enable it.

Cause 2: three payment failures auto-suspended it

If the toggle has a yellow warning icon next to it, your card failed three consecutive refill attempts and VEC auto-suspended the feature. The credits you were expecting never came because the charges all bounced. The full mechanics are in what happens when auto-refill fails 3 times and the recovery path is in how do I re-enable auto-refill after suspension.

Cause 3: the monthly cap was hit

If the toggle has a blue info icon next to it, you reached your monthly refill cap and the system disabled itself for the rest of the month. The cap defaults to 3. If you fired three refills already and then ran out again, the system will not fire a 4th — by design. Re-enable manually if you need more refills this month, or wait until the 1st of next month for the counter to reset.

Cause 4: no saved card on file

Auto-refill cannot work without a saved card. If you previously paid via crypto, or you deleted your saved card after enabling auto-refill, the feature has no card to charge. The settings modal usually catches this on save, but if a card was deleted after the fact, the feature silently has nothing to do when the threshold trips. See can I use auto-refill while paying with crypto for the card-required rule.

Cause 5: the threshold was set too low to react in time

A subtle one. Suppose your threshold is 1,000 and you run a bulk job that burns 5,000 credits in two seconds via the API. The balance can go from 5,500 straight to 500 (then 0) in the time between two cron ticks. The threshold check only runs once a minute, and if the burst is faster than the check, you can blow past the threshold before any refill is queued. Fix: raise the threshold so even a sudden burst of consumption cannot empty the account before the next monitoring tick.

How to figure out which cause applied

Open the Auto-Refill History page. If you see no rows around the time you ran out, none of the refill machinery fired — cause 1, 3, 4, or 5. If you see rows with status failed, the card declined — cause 2. The history is the fastest single source of evidence for what happened.