Kickbox vs Scrubby
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedKickbox compared with Scrubby
Scrubby is the mirror image: it costs more per credit than almost anyone and exists specifically to resolve the catch-all and risky addresses Kickbox refunds and abandons, going as far as sending real messages and watching for delayed bounces over 72 hours. Run Kickbox on the clean majority of a list and Scrubby on the risky residue if both problems matter; do not expect either one to do the other's job.
Scrubby compared with Kickbox
Kickbox and Scrubby cost roughly the same per credit and do precisely opposite things with a catch-all address. Kickbox detects it, refunds your credit, and declines to guess. Scrubby resolves it, charges you, and will send a real message to prove the point. Kickbox has the corporate parent, the SOC 2 posture, and thirty ESP connectors; Scrubby has the answer you were paying for. Choose by whether your value sits in the clean majority or the risky remainder.
Choose Kickbox if
Established email programmes at ecommerce, SaaS, and media companies that need a verifier their security team will approve, want native cleaning inside a major ESP, and care more about a predictable, defensible result than about the lowest possible price per credit.
Choose Scrubby if
Cold outbound agencies and B2B sales teams whose lists are heavy with catch-all and gateway-protected domains, where a recovered contact is worth many multiples of a verification credit and where being wrong about deliverability costs a sending domain rather than an open rate.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Kickbox | Scrubby |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Verification | Verification |
| Starting price | $5 for 500 verifications, with 100 free credits on signup (free plan available) | $47 per month for 6,000 credits, with 200 free credits on signup (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Prepaid verification credits on a published volume ladder, bought self-serve with no subscription requirement, with credits refunded automatically on risky and unknown results. | Monthly credit subscriptions with rollover, a pay-as-you-go alternative with non-expiring credits, and a published enterprise volume ladder above 100,000 a month. Quick Verification costs one credit, Deep Verification three, and the same balance covers enrichment. |
| Free plan | 100 free verifications on account creation, no credit card required. There is no recurring free allowance after that. | 200 free credits on account creation, usable for verification or person and company enrichment. No recurring free allowance. |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; 100 free verification credits with every new account | No time-limited trial; 200 free credits with no credit card, plus a fourteen-day satisfaction guarantee on monthly plans |
| Best for | Established email programmes at ecommerce, SaaS, and media companies that need a verifier their security team will approve, want native cleaning inside a major ESP, and care more about a predictable, defensible result than about the lowest possible price per credit. | Cold outbound agencies and B2B sales teams whose lists are heavy with catch-all and gateway-protected domains, where a recovered contact is worth many multiples of a verification credit and where being wrong about deliverability costs a sending domain rather than an open rate. |
| Setup time | Under ten minutes for a bulk clean: create an account, use the 100 free credits on a sample, buy a package, drag in the list. Connecting a native ESP integration adds a few minutes of OAuth. A real-time API integration on a signup form is a half-day job for a competent developer. | Minutes for a bulk upload or API key, and the 200 free credits mean a first real test costs nothing. The only planning required is scheduling: a deep verification job needs 72 hours in the calendar before the send date. |
| Learning curve | Low. The four-state result model is the category standard, and the only concepts you have to learn are the Sendex score and the reason codes, both of which are documented. The judgement call, what to do with the risky segment, is a business decision Kickbox deliberately leaves to you. | Low on mechanics and moderate on policy. The credit model is simple, but deciding which addresses deserve a three-credit deep check and which are fine on a one-credit quick check is a judgement that determines your bill, and it takes a couple of lists to calibrate. |
| Platforms | Web application, REST API, Batch verification API, Native ESP integrations, Zapier | Web application, REST API, CSV bulk upload, CRM cleaning integration, Free-standing testing tools |
| Compliance | SOC 2 (vendor stated), GDPR, Published trust centre, anti-spam policy, and status page | GDPR compliance (vendor stated), Encryption in transit and at rest, Auto-deletion after processing, No third-party audit report published |
| Founded | 2014 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, United States, with an EMEA office in London | Tallinn, Estonia |
| Ownership | Owned by Ziff Davis; operated as J2 Martech Corp within the Ziff Davis Growth Ecosystem | Privately held; part of the Vendisys sales-technology group |
Strengths and limitations
Kickbox
Strengths
- Refunding credits on risky and unknown results is the fairest billing policy in the category and removes the incentive to bill for non-answers.
- The largest and best-documented native ESP integration list of any verifier here, covering most platforms a mid-market marketing team is likely to run.
- Real corporate backing through Ziff Davis, with SOC 2, GDPR, a trust centre, a status page, US and EU processing, and a named team, which clears procurement in a way anonymous competitors cannot.
- The Sendex quality score and did-you-mean typo suggestion give you more to act on than a bare deliverable or undeliverable verdict.
Limitations
- No attempt to resolve catch-all addresses. Accept-all domains are detected and then abandoned, which makes Kickbox a poor fit for most B2B outbound work.
- The most expensive published ladder in this category at every volume, roughly five times MyEmailVerifier and three times EmailListVerify at 100,000 addresses.
- Credits expire after twelve months, unlike most competitors, which punishes buying ahead for a project that slips.
- Free allowance is 100 credits once, not 100 per day, so extended evaluation costs money.
Scrubby
Strengths
- Deep Verification is the only widely available method in this category that establishes deliverability by actually sending and watching for delayed bounces over 72 hours, rather than by inference.
- Quick Verification already covers catch-all and Secure Email Gateway protected domains in minutes at one credit, so the expensive mode is reserved for genuinely hard cases.
- Probing happens from Scrubby's infrastructure, so the reputation cost of testing hard addresses never touches your warmed sending domains.
- Credits roll over on monthly plans and never expire on pay-as-you-go, and the same balance covers person and company enrichment as well as verification.
Limitations
- Deep Verification sends real email to the addresses being checked, which is the exact practice BounceBan positions as a GDPR problem. Anyone with a strict legal or brand position on unsolicited contact should treat this as disqualifying rather than as a tradeoff.
- Latency: 24 hours for first deep results and 72 for final ones does not fit a same-day campaign, so deep checks must be planned into a schedule rather than run on demand.
- The most expensive credit in this profile set once the three-credit deep mode is in play, at an effective $0.015 to $0.024 per deep verification.
- No SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other third-party audit is published; the compliance story is a set of vendor statements.
Pricing compared
Kickbox
Prepaid verification credits on a published volume ladder, bought self-serve with no subscription requirement, with credits refunded automatically on risky and unknown results.
- Free credits$0
- Entry volumes$5 to $150
- Mid volumes$275 to $1,100
- High volumes$1,800 to $2,999
Kickbox is expensive per credit and cheap per problem avoided, which is the correct way to read it. Against MyEmailVerifier at $99 for 100,000 or EmailListVerify at $186, paying $500 looks indefensible on a spreadsheet, and for a pure bulk clean of a consumer list it probably is. What the premium actually buys is vendor risk reduction: a Ziff Davis parent, SOC 2, EU processing, a support team, roughly thirty native ESP connectors, and a published policy of refunding credits it cannot resolve. If your list lives inside Klaviyo or Braze and your security team reviews vendors, that bundle is worth several times the price difference. If your list is a scraped B2B file full of accept-all domains, Kickbox is the worst possible value, because the segment you most need answered is the one it will refund your credits for and decline to touch.
Scrubby
Monthly credit subscriptions with rollover, a pay-as-you-go alternative with non-expiring credits, and a published enterprise volume ladder above 100,000 a month. Quick Verification costs one credit, Deep Verification three, and the same balance covers enrichment.
- Starter$47
- Growth$97
- Pro$497
- Enterprise$0.008 to $0.004
Scrubby is the most expensive per-credit option profiled here once you use the mode you are actually paying for, and that is only defensible on a list where the risky segment is large and valuable. The arithmetic that matters is simple: if 30,000 addresses on a 100,000-row B2B list come back unknown from a conventional verifier, the question is what those 30,000 contacts are worth against a few hundred dollars of price difference. For an outbound agency selling five-figure contracts, it is not close. For a newsletter with a 2 percent accept-all share, paying $497 where MyEmailVerifier charges $99 buys nothing. The second consideration is not financial. Deep Verification sends real mail to real people to establish the answer, which is a method BounceBan explicitly refuses on GDPR grounds. If you can live with that, Scrubby offers the strongest evidence standard in the category. If you cannot, the price is irrelevant.
Editorial verdict on each
Kickbox
Kickbox is the safe, expensive, well-run choice, and it is honest about what it will and will not do. Refunding credits on risky and unknown results is the fairest billing policy in the category and should be table stakes everywhere; the Sendex score and typo suggestions give you more than a bare verdict; the ESP integration list and scheduled automations mean cleaning actually happens instead of being scheduled and forgotten; and the Ziff Davis parent, SOC 2 posture, and EU processing clear vendor reviews that anonymous competitors cannot. The two reasons not to buy it are both decisive when they apply. It is roughly three to five times the price of the budget field at every volume, and it will not touch a catch-all address. For a marketing team running a permission-based list inside Klaviyo, HubSpot, or Braze, that is a fine trade. For an outbound team whose value sits in the accept-all bucket, Kickbox is the most expensive way to be told no.
Read the full Kickbox profileScrubby
InnovationScrubby has the most defensible answer in the category to the hardest question in the category, and it charges accordingly. Quick Verification already resolves catch-all and gateway-protected domains that most competitors surrender on, and Deep Verification goes further than anyone by actually sending, waiting, and reading the delayed bounces that make lists look clean right up until they are not. The company is real and disclosed in a way several catch-all specialists are not: a named founder, an EU entity, more than 25 staff, and a group parent. The two reasons to walk away are both firm. The price per resolved address is the highest here once the three-credit deep mode is in use, and the deep method involves a vendor sending unsolicited mail to your prospects, which is precisely the practice a serious competitor refuses on privacy grounds. Decide that question first. If the answer is yes, buy the 200 free credits' worth of evidence before anything else, and reserve deep checks for the addresses whose answer is actually worth $0.015.
Read the full Scrubby profileKickbox profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Scrubby last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.