Terms of Service

KillBounce is an email verification service. You submit one or more email addresses to us (via single lookup, bulk upload, paste, or API call), and we return a structured result for each address: a 0-100 confidence score and a result bucket of Valid, Risky, Invalid, or Unknown. Internally we run a three-layer probe consisting of syntax validation, DNS and MX record checks, and a live SMTP conversation with the recipient mail server, with provider-aware scoring and explicit catch-all handling.

KillBounce is a verification service only. We do not send marketing or transactional email on your behalf, we do not provide an email service provider (ESP) or sending infrastructure, and we do not warm IPs, manage deliverability, or operate as an inbox provider. What we send to a recipient mail server during verification is limited to the minimum SMTP commands required to probe whether the address would accept mail; we do not deliver content.

The Service is offered as-is and on a pay-as-you-go basis. We may add, change, or remove features over time. Where a change materially reduces functionality you depend on, we will give reasonable notice via email and the dashboard.

To use the Service you must be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher) and capable of entering into a binding contract. If you are using the Service on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you are authorised to bind that organisation to these Terms, in which case "you" refers to that organisation.

You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information when creating your account, and to keep that information up to date. You may authenticate using email and password (stored as a bcrypt hash) or via Google or GitHub OAuth. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials, API keys, and OAuth sessions, and for all activity that occurs under your account. If you suspect unauthorised use, rotate your API keys from the dashboard immediately and email support@getkillbounce.com.

One person or organisation, one account. Creating multiple accounts to circumvent rate limits, abuse free credits, evade suspension, or fragment usage to dodge fair-use caps is a breach of these Terms. We may suspend or terminate any account that, in our reasonable judgement, breaches these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, or applicable law, with or without prior notice depending on the severity of the breach.

The Service is sold on a pay-as-you-go credit model. One credit equals one verification, regardless of the result returned. Pricing starts at US$4 per 1,000 credits and is displayed in your dashboard at the time of purchase; volume tiers may reduce the effective per-credit price. There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, and no commitment beyond the credits you choose to buy.

Credits do not expire. Once purchased, your credit balance remains available to use against verifications for as long as your account remains in good standing, subject to Section 14 (Term and Termination). Credits are a prepaid right to consume the Service; they are not currency, they have no cash value outside the Service, and the unused balance is not redeemable for cash refunds except as expressly set out in Section 4 (Refund Policy) or required by applicable law.

Payments are processed by Dodo Payments, which acts as the merchant of record for credit purchases. Dodo Payments handles the underlying card processing, invoicing, and collection of indirect taxes (such as GST, VAT, or sales tax) where applicable to your billing jurisdiction. Prices shown on the Service are exclusive of such taxes unless stated otherwise. Your relationship with Dodo Payments is governed by their terms; we are not responsible for their service, but we will assist with reasonable billing queries.

If a payment is reversed, charged back, or otherwise reclaimed after credits have been issued, we may deduct the equivalent credits from your balance and, if the balance is insufficient, suspend the account until the deficit is settled.

Our core commercial promise is the accuracy-miss refund. If we return a result of Valid for an address and that address hard-bounces on your actual send within seventy-two (72) hours of the verification, we will credit the consumed credit back to your account on request. This is the principal mechanism by which we stand behind our accuracy; it converts a probabilistic verification result into a concrete economic commitment.

To claim an accuracy-miss credit, send the original verification job ID (or API request ID), the recipient address, and the bounce evidence from your ESP (typically the SMTP rejection log or the bounce notification) to support@getkillbounce.com. The full refund process, including which bounce categories qualify and which do not (for example, soft bounces, content-based blocks, or recipient-side spam filtering are not accuracy misses), is described in our Refund Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference.

Outside the accuracy-miss mechanism, credits are non-refundable. We chose this structure because credits do not expire and have no minimum spend, so the customer's downside on a purchase is bounded by what they choose to top up. If statutory consumer-protection law in your jurisdiction grants you a broader refund right, that right is preserved.

You retain ownership of the email lists and any other data you upload to the Service (the "Customer Data"). We claim no licence to use Customer Data for any purpose other than operating the Service for you, processing the verifications you request, maintaining security, and meeting our legal obligations. We do not sell Customer Data, we do not use it to train models for third parties, and we do not share it with advertisers.

For verifications submitted via bulk upload, paste, or API, the uploaded list and the per-row results are retained for approximately seven (7) days from the completion of the job and then purged from the primary database and Redis cache. Aggregate counters on your user record (for example, total verifications run, total credits consumed, lifetime spend) are retained for as long as your account exists, because they are derived data that no longer identifies individual recipients and they support billing accuracy and account history.

Where we process Customer Data that constitutes personal data of EU, UK, or otherwise GDPR-covered individuals, we act as the processor and you act as the controller. The processing terms required by Article 28 of the GDPR (and the equivalent UK GDPR provisions) are set out in our Data Processing Addendum, which forms part of these Terms. Our broader privacy practices, including the lawful bases on which we process personal data for our own purposes (such as account administration and billing), are described in our Privacy Policy.

Your use of the Service is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. In summary, you must not use the Service to verify lists you do not have a lawful basis to email, to enumerate or harvest addresses for phishing or credential stuffing, to support unsolicited bulk mail (spam), to circumvent rate limits, or to interfere with the integrity or performance of the platform.

Abuse triggers immediate action. Where we identify a clear breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, or where continued use would expose recipient mail servers, our infrastructure, or other customers to harm, we may suspend the account immediately, with notice given as soon as reasonably practicable. Egregious or repeated breaches will result in termination under Section 14.

Suspension for acceptable-use breaches does not entitle you to a credit refund for the unused balance, except where the breach is contested in good faith and we ultimately conclude that no breach occurred.

The Service exposes a REST API for programmatic verification. API access is governed by fair-use limits intended to keep the platform fast and stable for everyone. The current per-minute and per-day caps are published in our developer documentation and may be tuned over time based on capacity. We will not silently lower caps on production accounts without notice.

Requests that exceed the published caps are throttled (typically returned with an HTTP 429 response) rather than billed. Sustained abuse of the API, including attempts to evade throttling, run distributed workloads under multiple accounts, or burst at volumes that degrade the Service for other customers, will result in throttling at a lower ceiling or account suspension.

If you have a legitimate use case that exceeds the standard caps (for example, a one-off bulk migration of several million addresses, or an integration with predictable peak windows), email support@getkillbounce.com in advance and we will arrange a higher limit. We would rather raise the ceiling than discover the load after the fact.

We operate the Service on a best-efforts basis. We monitor our infrastructure, run appropriate redundancy, and aim for high availability, but we do not currently commit to a contractual uptime SLA. The Service runs on VPS infrastructure (Webdock) with a self-hosted Postgres database and Redis cache, a Celery worker tier for bulk jobs, the dashboard served from Vercel, and Cloudflare in front for CDN and DDoS protection.

We may schedule maintenance windows during which the Service is partially or wholly unavailable. Where maintenance is planned and will materially affect availability, we will provide notice via the dashboard and, where the impact warrants it, by email. Emergency maintenance to address security or stability issues may be performed without prior notice.

Negotiated uptime SLAs may be available in future for larger customers. If you have a requirement for a written availability commitment, contact us and we will discuss what is possible at your volume.

As between you and us, KillBounce owns and retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Service, including the underlying software, verification engine, scoring models, documentation, designs, and the KillBounce name, logo, and other brand assets. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you, except for the limited right to use the Service in accordance with these Terms.

You retain ownership of Customer Data, as described in Section 5. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, process, and transmit Customer Data solely to provide the Service to you and to comply with our legal obligations.

You may refer to KillBounce by name and use the KillBounce wordmark or logo to indicate that you are a customer or to link to the Service, provided you do so in a way that is accurate, not misleading, and not suggestive of endorsement or partnership beyond what actually exists. We may revoke this permission at any time on reasonable notice.

If you submit feedback, feature requests, or suggestions about the Service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use that feedback to improve the Service, without any obligation to you. This clause is broad because acting on customer feedback is core to how we improve the product, and we want to be free to do so without tracking provenance.

Each party may be exposed to non-public information of the other in the course of the relationship ("Confidential Information"). Confidential Information includes Customer Data, pricing not publicly listed, technical information about the Service that is not in the public documentation, and any other information identified as confidential or that a reasonable person would understand to be confidential.

Each party agrees to (i) use the other's Confidential Information only as necessary to exercise its rights or perform its obligations under these Terms, (ii) protect it with at least the same degree of care it uses for its own confidential information of similar sensitivity (and in no event less than reasonable care), and (iii) not disclose it to third parties except to employees, contractors, and advisors who have a need to know and are bound by confidentiality obligations no less protective than these.

Confidential Information does not include information that is or becomes public through no fault of the receiving party, was lawfully known to the receiving party before disclosure, is independently developed without use of the disclosing party's Confidential Information, or is rightfully received from a third party without a duty of confidentiality. Disclosures compelled by law or regulator are permitted, provided that the receiving party gives the disclosing party prompt notice where lawful.

Each party warrants that it has the legal authority to enter into these Terms. We additionally warrant that we will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care, and we stand behind the accuracy of Valid results through the refund mechanism in Section 4.

EXCEPT FOR THE EXPRESS WARRANTIES AND THE REFUND COMMITMENT SET OUT ABOVE, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE". TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

Email verification is inherently probabilistic. Mail servers can be misconfigured, temporarily unavailable, catch-all configured, or actively designed to defeat probing. We do not warrant that any list we verify will be 100% deliverable, that any address we return as Valid will accept future mail indefinitely, or that any address we return as Invalid is permanently undeliverable. The accuracy-miss refund in Section 4 is the specific, bounded remedy we offer for cases where a Valid result is followed by a hard bounce on your send.

We make no representations regarding the legality of your underlying email programme. You are responsible for ensuring you have a lawful basis under applicable email marketing, anti-spam, and data protection laws (including CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR, the DPDP Act 2023, and any local equivalents) to contact the addresses on the lists you submit to us.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE TO THE OTHER FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, DATA, OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

EACH PARTY'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) US$100 OR (B) THE TOTAL FEES PAID BY YOU TO KILLBOUNCE IN THE THREE (3) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. THIS CAP IS CUMULATIVE ACROSS ALL CLAIMS, NOT PER-CLAIM.

The limitations in this Section do not apply to (i) a party's indemnification obligations under Section 13, (ii) breaches of confidentiality under Section 10, (iii) a customer's obligation to pay fees due, or (iv) any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law (such as liability for fraud, gross negligence, or wilful misconduct in jurisdictions where such liability cannot be capped).

The cap is sized to the economics of a pay-as-you-go product with a low per-credit price and an explicit accuracy-miss refund: the customer's primary remedy for a bad result is the credit refund, not a damages claim.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless KillBounce and its personnel from and against any third-party claims, damages, liabilities, and reasonable legal fees arising out of or related to (i) your misuse of the Service, (ii) your breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, (iii) Customer Data you submit to the Service (including any claim that processing the addresses you submitted violates a third party's rights or applicable law), or (iv) your underlying email programme, including any spam complaints, regulatory actions, or recipient claims arising from mail you send to addresses we verified.

We will defend, indemnify, and hold you harmless from any third-party claim alleging that your authorised use of the Service infringes that third party's intellectual property rights, and will pay damages finally awarded against you (or agreed in settlement) for such a claim. If the Service becomes, or in our reasonable opinion is likely to become, the subject of an infringement claim, we may at our option modify the Service to make it non-infringing, obtain a licence for your continued use, or terminate your account and refund any unused credit balance.

Our IP indemnity does not apply to claims arising from (a) Customer Data, (b) use of the Service in combination with products or data not supplied or recommended by us where the combination is the cause of the infringement, or (c) modifications to the Service made by anyone other than us.

The indemnifying party's obligations are conditional on the indemnified party giving prompt written notice of the claim, granting sole control of the defence and settlement (provided no settlement imposes a non-monetary obligation on the indemnified party without consent), and providing reasonable cooperation at the indemnifying party's expense.

These Terms apply from the date you first accept them (by creating an account or using the Service) and continue until terminated as described in this Section.

You may terminate your account at any time by deleting it from the dashboard or by emailing support@getkillbounce.com. We may terminate or suspend your account for material breach of these Terms (including the Acceptable Use Policy) on notice, or immediately where the breach is incapable of cure or where continued access would create an ongoing risk to the Service, other customers, or third-party mail servers. Either party may terminate for convenience on thirty (30) days written notice.

On termination, your right to access the Service ends. Any unused credit balance remains valid for use against verifications for twelve (12) months after termination, subject to you having an account in good standing to consume them; reinstating account access for this purpose is at our discretion where the termination was for breach. After the twelve-month period, unused credits are forfeited.

On request following termination, we will delete Customer Data from the primary database and Redis cache within thirty (30) days, subject to backup retention cycles and any legal obligation to retain certain records (for example, tax invoices). Aggregate counters on the user record may be retained where they are required for billing history, fraud-prevention, or accounting purposes.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination will do so, including Sections 3 (with respect to fees accrued), 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, and 17.

We may update these Terms from time to time to reflect changes to the Service, our legal or regulatory obligations, or our business. The current version is always available at this URL, and the "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent revision.

Where a change is material (for example, a change to the refund mechanism, the liability cap, the governing law, or the rights granted to us over Customer Data), we will give notice at least thirty (30) days before the change takes effect, by email to the address on file and via a banner in the dashboard. Non-material changes (typographical fixes, clarifications that do not change substantive rights, or updates to reflect minor operational changes) may take effect on posting.

Continued use of the Service after the effective date of an updated version constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not accept a change, your remedy is to stop using the Service and, where applicable, request a refund of unused credits to the extent permitted under Section 4 or applicable law.

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The Indian Contract Act 1872 and the Information Technology Act 2000 apply where relevant. Where the Data Processing Addendum applies and is more specific (for example, for processing of EU or UK personal data), the choice-of-law and forum provisions in the DPA prevail over this Section for the matters they address.

Subject to the small-claims carveout below, any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or in connection with these Terms, including any question regarding their existence, validity, or termination, will be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 of India. The seat and venue of arbitration will be Bengaluru, India. The arbitration will be conducted in English by a sole arbitrator agreed between the parties (or, failing agreement within thirty days, appointed in accordance with that Act). The arbitral award will be final and binding.

Either party may bring an action in a court of competent jurisdiction in Bengaluru for (i) claims that qualify for small-claims or summary procedures under local law, (ii) interim or injunctive relief to protect intellectual property, confidential information, or to prevent ongoing harm to the Service, or (iii) enforcement of an arbitral award. Nothing in this Section limits a consumer's right to bring proceedings in their local courts where that right is granted by mandatory consumer-protection law.

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the documents incorporated by reference (the Privacy Policy, Data Processing Addendum, Acceptable Use Policy, and Refund Policy), constitute the entire agreement between the parties regarding the Service and supersede any prior or contemporaneous understandings on the subject matter.

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any rights under them without our prior written consent, except to a successor in interest in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all of your assets, on notice to us. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganisation, or sale of substantially all of the assets of the KillBounce business.

No waiver. A party's failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of its right to enforce that provision later. Any waiver must be in writing and signed by the waiving party to be effective.

Notices. Notices to you will be sent to the email address on your account; notices to us must be sent to legal@getkillbounce.com. Notices are deemed received on the next business day after sending.

Force majeure. Neither party will be liable for delay or failure to perform (other than payment obligations) to the extent caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, labour disputes, governmental action, internet or telecommunications failures, denial-of-service attacks, and outages at upstream providers.

No agency. The parties are independent contractors. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, fiduciary, or employment relationship.

Questions about these Terms or about the Service should be directed to the appropriate address below. We read every email and aim to respond promptly.

• Legal and contractual matters: legal@getkillbounce.com
• Privacy and data protection requests: privacy@getkillbounce.com
• Data Protection Officer: dpo@getkillbounce.com
• Product support, billing queries, and refund requests: support@getkillbounce.com