Do free-tool checks count against my credit balance?

No. Nothing you do on the marketing-site free tools at Valid Email Checker (validemailchecker.com) touches your credit balance — not the SPF/DKIM/DMARC checkers and generators, not the signature generator, not the address generator, and not the free email verifier at /tools/email-verifier. Credits only exist on the dashboard side (app.validemailchecker.com), and only the dashboard's verification engine consumes them.

The architectural reason they are separate

The free verifier and the dashboard verifier call into two different edge functions internally. The free one is verify-email-public, deployed with verify_jwt = false so unauthenticated marketing traffic can reach it; the dashboard one is verify-email, which requires an authenticated user session. The free function consults the public-verifier rate-limit table (public_verify_attempts) before calling the provider. The dashboard function consults the user's credit buckets and deducts on success. They share the same provider stack and the same verification logic, but the billing/rate-limit layer is completely separate.

What that means in practice

• Using the free verifier while logged in does not cost you a credit. The browser hits the public endpoint regardless of your session.
• Hitting the daily quota on the free verifier does not affect your dashboard quota. The two limits are independent.
• Credits on the dashboard never expire because of free-tool inactivity. PAYG credits sit there indefinitely, untouched by what you do on the marketing site.
• The free verifier does not show up in Credits History. Because no credit is consumed, no transaction is logged.

When you actually start spending credits

Credits are deducted exclusively from dashboard activity:

• Single-email verification on the dashboard (app.validemailchecker.com/overview widget) — 1 credit per address.
• Bulk upload — 1 credit per address in the file.
• API call to /api/verify-single or /api/verify-bulk — 1 credit per address.
• Integrations that fire a verification on incoming events (Mailchimp subscriber join, HubSpot form submit, etc.).

What about Unknown auto-refunds

On the dashboard, if both verification engines return Unknown, the credit is refunded automatically and a refund row is logged in Credits History. The free verifier does not need this mechanism because no credit was charged in the first place — an Unknown result just costs nothing.

See what free tools does Valid Email Checker offer for the full free-tier inventory and difference between free verifier and dashboard for the comparison between the two single-verification surfaces.