Chargeable unit
High-Value Validation
A valid personal email result that is not role-based, catch-all, invalid, risky, or unknown.
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Credit policy
Email validation credit policy
How GTMAPIs reserves, consumes, and refunds credits for public Email Validation workflows.
Synchronous validation reserves credits before execution, consumes credits only for chargeable High-Value Validations, and refunds credits for non-chargeable or failed paths.
Unknown outcomes
Non-chargeable when uncertain
Temporary DNS, SMTP, provider, or transport uncertainty must not be charged as a successful validation.
Reserve first
Single-email and synchronous bulk validation reserve credits before execution so the account has enough balance for the requested work.
Consume only chargeable results
Only credits actually charged should be recorded as consumed. Refunded, cached-race, failed, or non-chargeable unknown paths must not increment consumed-credit counters.
Expose reconciliation fields
Validation summaries expose credits_reserved, credits_consumed, credits_refunded, and credits_charged as a compatibility alias for consumed credits.
Related resources
Common questions
Are all validation requests charged?
No. The documented policy distinguishes reserved credits from credits actually consumed by chargeable results.
Why does the API include both charged and consumed fields?
credits_charged is kept as a compatibility alias for consumed credits in public summaries.