Comparison
Publish Now Email Validation vs NeverBounce
NeverBounce makes you buy credits, track credits, and watch them expire after 12 months. Publish Now drops the credit system entirely. Drop your CSV, get a clean list, walk away.
Side by side
Pricing from NeverBounce's public page. Accuracy figures from the LeadMagic 2026 benchmark and vendor claims.
| Feature | Publish Now | NeverBounce |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $8 per 1,000 credits one-off, or $0.005 to $0.008 per email on plans |
| Free tier | Unlimited (rate-limited) | 1,000 credits with signup; credits expire in 12 months |
| Accuracy | 70–90% (MX + DoH) | 99.9% (their claim) / mid-pack on cold email lists per puzzleinbox 2026 |
| Signup required | ||
| API available | — (roadmap) | |
| SMTP probing | ||
| Catch-all handling | Limited | Limited |
| Best for | Free first-pass list cleanup before send | Teams already on ZoomInfo or Mailchimp who want a native sync rather than a CSV round-trip. |
Pick NeverBounce if…
- ▸You are already in the ZoomInfo or Mailchimp ecosystem and want one-click list cleaning inside those tools.
- ▸You need API verification at scale with usage-based billing and SLA-backed uptime.
- ▸You run repeated weekly or monthly cleans and want stored history, dashboards, and analytics per list.
Pick Publish Now if…
- ▸You hate the idea of buying credits you might not use, watching them expire, and topping up again next quarter.
- ▸You only need to clean a list once or twice a year and refuse to maintain a vendor account for it.
- ▸You want the result file in your browser in under a minute without logging into anything.
"Bought 50k NeverBounce credits for a one-time client project. Used 8k, the rest expired. Lesson learned."
Frequently asked
Is Publish Now as accurate as NeverBounce?
For first-pass cleanup, very close. NeverBounce runs SMTP probes on top of MX checks, which catches a few more dead mailboxes on edge cases. For obvious junk - bad syntax, dead domains, no MX record - we land the same hits at $0.
Why is Publish Now free when NeverBounce charges per credit?
We deliberately did not build a credit economy. Our checks run on free DNS infrastructure (Cloudflare DoH) and we do not store your list after the job. No metering, no billing, no expiring balances to police.
Should I use NeverBounce or Publish Now first?
Run Publish Now first to strip syntax errors, dead domains, and missing MX records. Then push the survivors through NeverBounce if you want the SMTP-probe pass for high-stakes campaigns. You will burn fewer of their credits.
Do Publish Now credits expire like NeverBounce credits?
We do not have credits at all. There is nothing to expire. Every CSV upload is a fresh free job.
Can I get a refund on unused NeverBounce credits?
Their TOS does not cover refunds on credits that expire after 12 months, which is one of the most common complaints on review sites. That is a big reason teams who clean lists once or twice a year end up using a free tool like ours instead.