Do team members share my credits?

Yes — every team member you invite on Valid Email Checker draws from the same credit pool you do. There is no separate per-member balance, no monthly allowance you can hand out, and no division of the Monthly and Pay-As-You-Go buckets across the team. One pool, one set of credits, multiple operators. This is the entire point of team-management on VEC: bring more verifiers onto the account without splitting the budget into administered sub-buckets.

How the shared pool actually works

Every verification — single, bulk, integration-driven — debits credits from the owner's account. The system follows the standard credit-spending priority: Monthly bucket first (because monthly credits expire each cycle, so they should burn first), then Pay-As-You-Go (which never expires). It does not matter whether the owner triggered the verification or a team member did; the bucket selection is identical.

On the team-member side, the dashboard sidebar widget shows the same balance the owner sees. If the owner has 4,200 Monthly + 3,800 PAYG = 8,000 total, every team member sees 8,000 too. When a member runs a 500-email bulk job, the next page load shows 7,500 across all members and the owner. The balance is the account-level state, not a per-user counter.

Why we built it this way

Three reasons:

• Most teams want one budget. The owner controls finance, the team executes — splitting credits across members forces the owner to predict who needs what each month, which nobody wants to do.
• Bulk lists do not divide cleanly. A 50,000-row import does not care which team member uploaded it. Sub-quotas would block legitimate work whenever one member happened to draw the short straw.
• No-seat-limit pricing depends on it. Per-member quotas would require seat-tier pricing to make sense. Keeping the pool shared lets us keep adding team members free.

The accountability side

Sharing the pool does not mean losing visibility into who used what. Every credit movement is logged with the user who triggered it:

• The credit_transactions table stores user_id (always the owner — that is the account that owns the credits) and performed_by_user_id (the specific user who ran the verification, owner or team member).
• On the Credits History page, every row identifies which team member triggered the spend.
• The Team page on the owner dashboard shows per-member running totals — credits used this month, last sign-in, total verifications.
• Inside the team member's own dashboard, they see only their own usage stats, not the totals of other members.

What if I want per-member spending caps?

Not currently supported. The shared-pool design is intentional and there is no in-app way to set a hard ceiling on what a single team member can verify per month. If a specific member is over-consuming, your options are:

• Talk to them — usage is visible per-member, so you have the data.
• Suspend them temporarily while you sort it out — see how do I suspend a team member temporarily.
• Set low-balance email alerts so you get notified before the pool runs out.
• Email support@validemailchecker.com if per-member quotas are a hard requirement for your team — it is on the roadmap and we prioritize features customers ask for repeatedly.