Hunter.io is a great prospecting tool. It finds email addresses, and verifies them as a bonus. If you already have your list, that means paying $49 a month for the half you never touch. BounceShift only verifies, and bills $0.0049 for each address you check.
TL;DR
Hunter.io is built around finding emails and domain search, with verification bundled into its plans. BounceShift is a verification-only specialist with pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.0049/email and credits that never expire. Choose Hunter if your job is discovering new contacts. Choose BounceShift if you already have a list and just need it cleaned cheaply and accurately.
BounceShift is a Hunter.io alternative for teams that only need verification. Hunter is a prospecting suite where verification is one feature of a $49/month subscription with credits that reset monthly; BounceShift charges $0.0049 per email with no subscription and no expiry. If you need to find addresses rather than check them, keep Hunter.
Drag to your list size. Bigger packs cost less per address, and the credits you buy stay yours.
10,000 addresses
BounceShift
$29/mo
on Starter — unused credits roll over
or $49 as a one-off, no plan. Credits never expire either way.
Hunter.io
Subscription
Hunter bills a monthly subscription rather than per address. Verification credits are capped by tier, so a list this size needs a plan at or above $49 a month, every month, whether or not you validate anything.
Hunter.io does not publish a per-address rate, so there is no honest number to put here. Ours is exact.
Hunter's plans are priced around email finding and domain search. If your list is already built and you only need to verify it, a large slice of what you pay for sits idle.
Hunter runs on monthly plans with allocations that reset on a cycle. If your verification needs are bursty — a big import now, nothing next month — a metered model fits the work far better.
For Hunter, verification supports the finding workflow. A dedicated engine treats it as the main course: MX, SMTP, catch-all, and reputation signals layered together rather than a quick pass.
Hunter.io is a genuinely good product for the job it was designed to do: discovering email addresses. If you're running cold outbound, building a prospect list from scratch, or researching who to contact at a target company, Hunter's domain search, finder, and browser extension are exactly the right tools. Its built-in verification is a sensible convenience — you can confirm an address right after you find it. For sales and growth teams whose core problem is "who do I email and how do I reach them," Hunter earns its place. We're not here to talk you out of it when finding is the real need.
BounceShift starts where finding ends. If you already have the addresses — an exported CRM segment, a newsletter list, signup data, or a CSV a colleague handed you — then the discovery half of Hunter is dead weight. BounceShift runs multi-layer verification: an MX-record check, a real SMTP mailbox probe, disposable-address detection, role-account detection, and catch-all detection, plus crowdsourced reputation tracking fed by ESP webhooks from Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, and Amazon SES (addresses are stored only as one-way hashes — raw emails are never kept). You pay $0.0049 per email, get 100 free credits at signup with no card, and those credits never expire, so a quarterly list clean costs cents and nothing rots in an unused monthly allowance. Need scale or automation? Upload a CSV of up to 100,000 emails for parallel processing, or call the real-time REST API (typically 200–500ms per address) straight from your app. See the full pay-as-you-go and monthly pricing if you'd rather a predictable plan (Starter $29, Pro $79, Business $199, Enterprise $499, with allowances that roll over).
Moving a list across takes about five minutes — no integration project required:
What you pay, what you get for free, and whether unused credits survive the month.
| Aspect | BounceShift | Hunter.io |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go, no subscription required | Monthly subscription |
| Price per email | $0.0049 at 10,000, down to $0.0025 | $49/month plan, verification bundled |
| Free credits on signup | 100, no credit card | 50 per month, shared with search |
| Credit expiry | Never | Monthly reset |
| Approx. cost for 10,000 validations | ~$49 | Bundled into the subscription tier |
| Approx. cost for 100,000 validations | ~$250, volume discounts above that | Higher subscription tier required |
| Monthly plans | Optional: Starter $29 / 10,000, Growth $79 / 50,000, Scale $199 / 150,000 — allowances roll over and never expire | Required |
| Per-seat charges | None, unlimited team members on one credit pool | Seats included per tier |
| Time to first validation | Minutes, self-serve | Minutes, self-serve |
The checks that run on every address, and how the verdict is reported back to you.
| Aspect | BounceShift | Hunter.io |
|---|---|---|
| Syntax check and typo correction | Yes, a did_you_mean correction on every result | Yes |
| MX record lookup | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP mailbox probe | Yes, RCPT TO without sending a message | Yes |
| Catch-all detection | Yes, its own status rather than folded into valid | Yes |
| Disposable address detection | Yes, 3,000+ throwaway domains | Yes |
| Role account detection | Yes, info@, support@, sales@ and similar | Yes |
| Reputation from real send outcomes | Yes, crowdsourced from connected ESP webhooks | Not published |
| Confidence score | 0–100 on every result | Not published |
| Granular sub-status | Yes, documented at /developers/status-codes | Not published |
| Behaviour when a probe is inconclusive | Returns unknown or catch_all at low confidence, never rounds up to valid | Not published |
How you actually call it: real time at signup, bulk on an existing list, or automatically from your ESP.
| Aspect | BounceShift | Hunter.io |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time REST API | Yes, typically 200–500ms per address | Yes |
| Batch CSV | Up to 100,000 addresses per batch, processed in parallel | Yes |
| ESP webhook ingestion | Included: Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, Amazon SES | Not published |
| Official SDKs | PHP, Laravel, and Node, all MIT licensed | Not published |
| OpenAPI spec and docs | Public, no signup: /docs/api and /docs/api.json | Not published |
| Dashboard | Yes, self-serve with usage and batch history | Yes |
Where your contacts end up once you have handed them over.
| Aspect | BounceShift | Hunter.io |
|---|---|---|
| How your addresses are stored | Validation results cached 24 hours, then deleted | Not published |
| Reputation data storage | One-way hashes only, raw addresses are never written to disk | Not published |
| Support | Email support on every plan, including free |
Hunter.io figures last checked 23 July 2026. Where we could not point at a published source, the cell reads "Not published" rather than "No" — check Hunter.io's own site before you buy.
BounceShift is a dedicated email validation tool that focuses purely on verification. Hunter.io combines email finding and verification in one subscription; BounceShift specializes in multi-layer validation with pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.0049 per email and credits that never expire.
Yes. BounceShift has no subscription requirement at all. You buy credits at $0.0049 each and spend them whenever you like, so a one-off list of 10,000 addresses costs about $10 rather than a $49 monthly plan you keep paying for between campaigns.
BounceShift credits never reset. Hunter's plan credits are allocated monthly and lapse, which is the part that stings if your outreach is seasonal. Our optional monthly plans roll their allowance forward instead of clearing it.
Yes. Export your contacts from Hunter as a CSV, then upload the file to BounceShift (up to 100,000 emails per batch) or send them through the REST API. Review the valid, invalid, and catch-all results, then re-import the cleaned list back into your outreach or CRM tool. You start with 100 free credits and no credit card.
A catch_all status with a low confidence score, kept separate from valid. Catch-all servers accept mail for every address, so no probe can prove a specific mailbox exists there. Guessing valid on those addresses is how a prospecting list quietly turns into a bounce spike.
No. BounceShift does not find or guess email addresses and has no domain search. It is a dedicated verification service for lists you already have. If discovering new contacts is your main job, Hunter is the better fit; if you need to clean and verify existing addresses cheaply, BounceShift is the specialist.
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