What hours is live chat available?

Live chat inside the Valid Email Checker support widget is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is never a time when you open the widget, click Contact us, and find chat unavailable. The reason this works is that the first responder is not a human shift — it is Alex, our AI support agent, which is on duty continuously.

The 24/7 part: AI live chat

Alex is built on GPT-4o-mini and has real-time access to your account context (credits, recent verification tasks, subscription status, invoices) plus the entire help-center knowledge base. For most product questions — "what does catch-all mean?", "where is my API key?", "how do I cancel my subscription?", "why did my last verification cost two credits?" — Alex answers in seconds. There is no waiting room, no out-of-office message, no "we will get back to you Monday."

The business-hours part: human pickup

When a chat needs to be escalated to a human — refund decisions, account-level changes, bug reports that need triage, complex enterprise questions — the conversation moves into a queue. A human picks it up. During our standard business hours (Monday through Friday, approximately 9am to 6pm UTC), human pickup is usually 5-20 minutes after escalation. Outside those hours and on weekends, the chat sits in the queue until the next business morning. The conversation stays open the whole time; you do not need to start over when the human joins.

Why we set it up this way

A traditional 24/7 human-staffed live chat costs a lot to run and is uneven in quality across shifts. By putting the AI in front of every chat, we can guarantee a fast, accurate first response at any hour while keeping the human team focused on the cases where human judgment actually matters. Most chats are fully resolved by Alex without ever needing a human — and those that do get escalated arrive with full context, which makes the human pickup faster too.

What if my question is urgent and it is 3am UTC?

• Open a chat with Alex anyway. A lot of urgent questions (lost API key, how to pause auto-refill, where a verification result is) are answerable on the spot.
• If Alex correctly identifies that you need a human, the chat gets queued and you will see a "stepping back so they can help" message. Reply with as much detail as possible in that same thread so the human is fully briefed when they pick it up.
• Account-security emergencies (suspected unauthorized access, account locked out, lost authenticator) get prioritized in the queue regardless of clock time.