Refund Policy

KillBounce sells email verification on a pay-as-you-go basis. You buy credits, you spend one credit per verification, and what you do not spend stays on your account indefinitely. There is no subscription, no minimum spend, and no expiry date on purchased credits. Because of that structure, we do not offer a money-back guarantee on credit packs at all — once a pack purchase has completed, the money paid is not returned to your payment method. The pay-as-you-go model is already a money-back guarantee, in the sense that you only pay for what you actually consume.

What we do offer, and what sits at the centre of this policy, is the accuracy-miss refund. If we tell you an address is Valid and that address hard-bounces on your actual outbound send within seventy-two (72) hours of the verification, we credit the consumed credit back to your account. That is the principal commercial promise behind our verification result, and the rest of this policy describes how it works, where it does not apply, and what we do in adjacent situations (system errors, duplicate jobs, account closure, chargebacks, and tax).

In summary: credits remain valid for as long as the account is active, charges apply only to verifications that complete, and a qualifying accuracy-miss claim returns the consumed credit to the account balance.

The accuracy-miss refund is the brand promise. It is how we stand behind the Valid verdict. Every other verdict (Risky, Invalid, Unknown) is, by design, an explicit statement that we are not certain the address will accept mail, and so the accuracy-miss mechanism does not extend to them.

The promise. If KillBounce returns a result of Valid (status VALID) for an email address, and that same address hard-bounces on your actual outbound send within seventy-two (72) hours of the verification timestamp, we will credit the consumed credit back to your account on request. The seventy-two-hour window reflects the reality that mailbox state can change over time (mailboxes get closed, mail servers get reconfigured, domains get parked) and we are willing to stand behind the result for a reasonable post-verification window, not forever.

Credits only, not cash. One miss, one credit. The accuracy-miss refund is satisfied by returning the affected credit to your account balance. It is calculated per missed address, one credit per address — so if you verified a batch of one hundred (100) addresses and one (1) of the Valid results bounced, one (1) credit is returned to your balance, not one hundred. The refund is not paid out as cash, is not returned to your card or payment method, and does not entitle you to cancel a credit pack or demand a money refund. Your remedy is the credit, used the next time you verify an address.

How to claim. Forward the bounce notification or the relevant SMTP log to support@getkillbounce.com, with the affected addresses clearly listed and, where possible, the KillBounce job ID or API request ID for the verification. The bounce evidence we need is whatever your email service provider (ESP) gives you for a hard bounce: a delivery status notification (DSN), an SMTP rejection log line with the 5xx code and reason, or the bounce report exported from your ESP dashboard. Screenshots are accepted but a forwarded message or log line is faster to verify.

Turnaround. We review claims and credit qualifying refunds within five (5) business days of receipt. If we need additional information (for example, the job ID, or a clearer copy of the bounce evidence), we will reply within that same window so the clock is never silent on you.

Exclusions. The accuracy-miss refund is targeted at the specific case where a Valid verdict turned out to be wrong about mailbox existence. It does not extend to:

• Addresses on catch-all domains that we marked Risky or Unknown. A catch-all domain accepts mail to any address at the domain regardless of whether the mailbox exists, and we explicitly do not return a Valid verdict in that case. Because those addresses were never marked Valid, a subsequent bounce is not an accuracy miss.
• Deliverability issues unrelated to mailbox existence: sender reputation problems, content-based spam filtering, recipient-side gateway blocks, IP or domain blocklists affecting your sending infrastructure, DMARC or SPF misalignment on your side, or throttling by the recipient mail server. These are real problems but they are not problems with the verification result; they are problems with the send.
• Addresses tested with check_smtp=false (or any other configuration that disables the live SMTP probe). When you ask us to skip the SMTP layer, the result we return is a syntax-and-DNS judgement and we cannot stand behind it as a mailbox-level accuracy claim. If you want the accuracy-miss promise, leave the SMTP probe on.
• Soft bounces, deferrals, and other transient failures. The promise covers hard bounces, which are permanent rejections (typically 5xx SMTP responses such as "user unknown" or "mailbox does not exist").
• Sends made more than seventy-two (72) hours after the verification. Mailbox state drifts over time and a refund window without a limit is not a real commitment.

We err on the side of crediting back where the bounce evidence is clear and the timing is within the window. If a claim is borderline, we will tell you what we are looking at and why, not silently reject it.

Credit packs are non-refundable. Once a pack purchase has completed, the amount paid is not returned to your payment method — regardless of how many credits from the pack have or have not been used.

The rationale is straightforward: credits do not expire, there is no minimum spend, and you can buy a small pack first to confirm the Service works for your use case before scaling up. The pay-as-you-go model already eliminates the downside that a money-back guarantee would otherwise address, and we do not offer a separate cooling-off window or "change of mind" refund on top of it.

Your remedy for verifications you are dissatisfied with is the accuracy-miss refund in Section 2 (which returns credits to your balance, not cash), the failed-verification credit-back in Section 4, and the duplicate-job mechanism in Section 5. If a statutory right under consumer-protection law in your jurisdiction grants you a broader cooling-off or refund window, that right is preserved and is not displaced by this Section.

A verification can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the address itself: an internal queue error, an upstream DNS resolver outage, a Celery worker crash, or a recipient mail server that closes the SMTP connection without giving us enough information to score the result. When a verification cannot complete cleanly, the result is recorded as a system error rather than as a verdict against the address.

The intended behaviour is that credits are not deducted for verifications that do not complete. Our billing logic charges on result issuance, not on attempt. In normal operation, you should never see a credit consumed for an errored job.

If a credit is deducted for a verification that did not actually return a result (for example, because of a race condition between the worker and the billing path), email support@getkillbounce.com with the affected job ID or API request ID. We will reconcile against the underlying logs and credit back any amounts that were charged for non-completing work, typically within three (3) business days. You do not need to forward bounce evidence for this category; it is an internal billing reconciliation, not an accuracy claim.

For bulk uploads, KillBounce performs deduplication and result caching to prevent duplicate billing. If you upload a list that contains addresses we have already verified for your account inside the cache window, we return the cached result rather than running a fresh SMTP probe. Where the cached result is returned, no new credit is consumed.

Separately, if a customer re-uploads what is effectively the same list within a twenty-four (24) hour window (for example, because of a workflow mistake, a webhook retry, or a duplicate cron run), and credits were charged for the duplicate processing, we will refund the duplicate credits on request. Email support@getkillbounce.com with the two job IDs and a brief description of the duplicate, and we will reconcile.

This refund is discretionary in the sense that we look at the underlying data to confirm it is genuinely a duplicate (not, for example, a list where most addresses repeated but a meaningful subset were new), but in practice we resolve obvious duplicates in your favour without friction.

You can close your KillBounce account at any time from the dashboard or by emailing support@getkillbounce.com. There is no exit fee and no obligation to provide a reason.

When you close your account, any unused credit balance remains attached to the account for twelve (12) months from the termination date. If you reactivate the account within that window, the unused balance is restored and ready to use against verifications. We set the window to twelve months because purchase cycles in this category vary and we would rather give customers a real chance to come back than quietly forfeit credits at the door.

Unused credits are not redeemable for cash. We do not pay out credit balances on termination, whether by bank transfer, refund to the original payment method, or any other means, except where applicable consumer-protection law requires us to do so. The pay-as-you-go model already lets you size each purchase to your near-term need, which is the structural mitigation for this rule.

After the twelve-month window expires without reactivation, the unused credits are considered forfeited and the account record may be fully deleted in line with our Privacy Policy.

If we terminate your account for a breach of our Terms of Service or our Acceptable Use Policy, any unused credit balance is forfeited at the point of termination. We do not refund forfeited credits to cash, and they are not available for reactivation. This is intentional: a customer who has been terminated for, say, verifying scraped or non-consented lists, or for credential stuffing patterns against recipient mail servers, should not be entitled to retain economic value from the relationship.

We do not apply this rule lightly. Forfeiture only attaches to terminations where we have concluded, on the basis of the underlying conduct, that there was a material breach of the Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. If you believe a forfeiture was applied in error, you can dispute it under Section 9 and we will review the decision.

Forfeiture does not affect amounts already legitimately invoiced and paid to Dodo Payments for completed services, nor does it create a debt running back to the customer for credits previously used in good faith.

We would rather resolve a billing problem directly than learn about it from a card network notification. If something looks wrong on your invoice or your balance, please email support@getkillbounce.com first. We commit to investigating and resolving any genuine billing issue within five (5) business days, including refunding amounts that were incorrectly charged.

Filing a chargeback with your card issuer without first contacting us is treated as a serious step. Where a chargeback is filed without prior contact, we may suspend the associated KillBounce account pending resolution, and we may recover from you the reasonable costs we incur in responding to the chargeback (including network fees and administrative time). Where a chargeback is found in our favour, the disputed amount plus those recovery costs are restored against the account.

None of this limits your statutory right to dispute a fraudulent or unauthorised transaction with your card issuer. If your card was used to purchase credits without your authorisation, please tell us as soon as you can; we will work with Dodo Payments to resolve the matter and we will not penalise you for raising it in good faith.

Dodo Payments acts as the merchant of record for KillBounce credit purchases. That means Dodo Payments is responsible, where applicable, for collecting and remitting indirect taxes on the transaction, including Indian Goods and Services Tax (GST), value-added tax (VAT) in EU and UK jurisdictions, and sales tax in US jurisdictions where Dodo is registered.

Where a credit refund is issued under this policy and tax was originally collected on the underlying transaction, the tax portion of the refund is handled by Dodo Payments in line with their merchant-of-record processes and the rules of the relevant tax authority. In practice, when we refund a transaction through Dodo's system, the tax follows the refund automatically. If you need a corrected tax invoice or a GST credit note, email support@getkillbounce.com with the original invoice reference and we will request it from Dodo on your behalf.

For business customers in India who are claiming input tax credit on KillBounce invoices, please make sure the GSTIN on your account matches the GSTIN under which you intend to claim. Corrections to a GSTIN after an invoice has been issued are subject to Dodo's reissuance rules and may not always be possible after the relevant filing period has closed.

The right inbox saves time on both sides. Use the addresses below depending on what you need.

• Refund claims (accuracy-miss, errored verifications, duplicate jobs, tax invoice questions): support@getkillbounce.com
• Disputes, contested terminations, and formal legal notices relating to this policy: legal@getkillbounce.com
• Privacy and data deletion requests tied to account closure are handled separately under our Privacy Policy at privacy@getkillbounce.com.