Comparison
Publish Now Email Validation vs Bouncer
Bouncer does deep SMTP probing on every address, which is thorough and slow. Publish Now skips the probe and clears the obvious junk in seconds using MX and DoH - the fast first pass before Bouncer's expensive one.
Side by side
Pricing from Bouncer's public page. Accuracy figures from the LeadMagic 2026 benchmark and vendor claims.
| Feature | Publish Now | Bouncer |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $0.008/email, dropping to $0.003 at volume; subscriptions from $20/mo for 1,000 |
| Free tier | Unlimited (rate-limited) | 100 verifications per month with signup |
| Accuracy | 70–90% (MX + DoH) | 99% (their claim) / high accuracy via SMTP probing, with the sender-reputation risk that comes with it |
| Signup required | ||
| API available | — (roadmap) | |
| SMTP probing | ||
| Catch-all handling | Limited | Yes |
| Best for | Free first-pass list cleanup before send | Senders who need confidence scores on catch-all domains and can wait for a deep SMTP pass. |
Pick Bouncer if…
- ▸You send into a lot of catch-all domains and need a confidence score on each one, not a binary verdict.
- ▸You can tolerate slower processing on big lists in exchange for deeper SMTP-level certainty.
- ▸You want a paid subscription with team seats, audit history, and per-list analytics inside a dashboard.
Pick Publish Now if…
- ▸You want a 100k-row CSV cleaned now, not in 20 minutes of SMTP probing.
- ▸You do not want to register an SMTP-probing tool to your own IP reputation by hitting target mailservers from your domain.
- ▸You only need the obvious junk gone before sending - hard syntax errors, dead domains, missing MX - and Bouncer is overkill for that.
Frequently asked
Is Publish Now as accurate as Bouncer?
For obvious bad addresses, yes. Bouncer's edge is SMTP probing, which actually pings the mailserver to ask if a mailbox exists. We deliberately skip that step because it is slow and can hurt sender reputation. For first-pass list cleanup, MX plus DoH is plenty.
Why is Publish Now free when Bouncer charges per email?
Bouncer spends real money on SMTP probing - distributed IPs, mailserver coordination, retry queues. We do not run those probes, so we have no per-verification cost to pass on. Free is the natural price.
Should I use Bouncer or Publish Now first?
Use Publish Now to drop the obvious junk first. Send the survivors through Bouncer if you genuinely need SMTP-level confidence on catch-all domains. You will pay Bouncer for a smaller list and get the verdict faster.
Does Publish Now do SMTP probing like Bouncer?
No, and that is intentional. SMTP probes are slow, get rate-limited by big providers (Gmail, Outlook), and can damage your sender reputation if done from your own infrastructure. We stick to MX and DoH for the fast, safe first pass.
How does Publish Now handle catch-all domains?
We flag them as unknown rather than guessing. Bouncer's selling point is scoring catch-alls with a confidence percentage. If that scoring is critical to your workflow, run our pass first to cut your list, then let Bouncer score what remains.