InboxPolicy vs Hunter

By Aria Pramesi, founder of InboxPolicy · Updated July 9, 2026

Hunter is an email finder first: Domain Search, Discover, and outreach Campaigns, with a verifier and an MCP server bundled in from $49/month in shared credits. InboxPolicy doesn't find anything, it's a pure send-decision API at $0.01 per call. Pick Hunter if you need discovery plus a verifier and campaign tooling in one subscription. Pick InboxPolicy if you already have addresses and need a fresh, per-send action with no account. Many teams reasonably use both: find with Hunter, decide with InboxPolicy.

Finder vs decider: what does each tool actually do?

Hunter's core product is finding email addresses: Domain Search looks up every address pattern at a company, Discover is a searchable B2B contact database, and Campaigns runs outreach sequences on top of that data. Verification is a feature layered onto the finder, run automatically on results and available as a standalone checker, using format validation, gibberish detection, disposable-domain checks, MX record lookups, an SMTP handshake that simulates delivery without sending, and what Hunter calls "a proprietary solution" for detecting accept-all domains.

InboxPolicy doesn't find anything. It assumes you already have an address, from Hunter, Apollo, a form fill, or a CRM, and answers one question at send time: is this safe to send to right now? It runs syntax, MX, and live SMTP checks against its own verification engine, then applies a deliverability policy that returns one of five actions, send, send_with_caution, review, retry_later, or avoid, with a confidence score and the SMTP evidence behind it. There's no discovery, no database, no campaign tooling; it's one narrow job done at the moment that matters.

That difference in scope is why this comparison is less clean than a status-field-vs-status-field matchup. Hunter and InboxPolicy solve adjacent problems, and for a lot of workflows the honest answer is to use both rather than pick one.

How do the two handle catch-all domains?

Background: how catch-all email verification works and why these addresses need routing rather than a yes/no.

Hunter takes catch-all seriously. Its own published research estimates 38% of domains are configured as accept-all, and found that accept-all addresses bounce roughly 27% of the time versus about 1% for addresses verified as valid, a 27x difference. Hunter's guidance is to cap accept-all sends at 2-5% of an outreach list, weight toward contacts with confidence scores of 85-100% from multiple sources, and fall back to other channels like LinkedIn for addresses it can't resolve with confidence, including a Google "people chip" technique for Workspace domains.

InboxPolicy takes a structurally similar position from the decision side: catch-all and other unknown results map to review, never guessed as safe. Roughly 30-40% of B2B addresses sit on catch-all domains, close to Hunter's independently reported 38% figure, which is one of the few places both companies' data lines up. Where they differ is what happens next: Hunter's catch-all guidance is advice for a human curating a list before a campaign; InboxPolicy's review action is a machine-readable signal an agent or pipeline can branch on automatically, at the moment of an individual send.

How does pricing compare?

As of July 2026, Hunter bundles search and verification into one shared monthly credit pool. Free is 50 credits/month; Starter is $49/month ($34/month billed yearly) for 2,000 credits; Growth is $149/month ($104/month yearly) for 10,000 credits; Scale is $299/month ($209/month yearly) for 25,000 credits; Enterprise is custom. All paid plans get a 30% discount when billed annually. Because credits are spent on both finding addresses and verifying them, there isn't a clean published "$ per 1,000 verifications" figure to quote, the effective cost depends on how a given account splits its usage between the two.

InboxPolicy charges $0.01 per fresh verification pay-per-call through the x402 protocol, USDC on Base, no account or API key. For prepaid volume: Starter is $5 for 1,000 credits ($5.00/1k), Builder is $19 for 5,000 ($3.80/1k), and Growth is $79 for 25,000 ($3.16/1k), with volume pricing available on request. There's no free tier, the $0.01 x402 call is the trial by design, since free tiers tend to attract list-cleaning abuse. Three things stay free regardless of plan: cache re-verification within 72 hours (from_cache, 0 credits), malformed-email rejection before SMTP, and idempotent retries on the same key.

Which one fits an agent or automated workflow?

Hunter shipped an official MCP server in 2025 that lets Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini query Hunter's finder and verifier data through natural language, on paid plans, so a person can ask an AI assistant to "find the email for the CEO of Acme Corp" or "verify this list" without writing code. It's built for a human directing an assistant to look something up interactively, and it still runs on a subscription account.

InboxPolicy's MCP server is built for the opposite direction: an autonomous agent calling decide_send or verify_email as tools and getting back a send/no-send action it can act on without a human in the loop, plus batch tools and usage. The REST API adds idempotency keys, per-item batch results, async batches up to 50,000 emails, and signed completion webhooks. On top of that, the x402 flow lets an agent skip account setup entirely: a keyless request returns HTTP 402 with machine-readable payment terms, the agent pays $0.01 in USDC on Base via a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header, and gets its decision plus an on-chain settlement receipt. Hunter has no equivalent pay-per-call path; every request runs against a subscription's shared credit pool.

When does Hunter actually win?

If the job starts with "who do I even email," Hunter is the right tool and InboxPolicy isn't built for it at all, InboxPolicy has no discovery, no B2B database, and no campaign sequencing. Hunter's Discover and Domain Search are the reason to reach for it: a bundled subscription that finds contacts, verifies them, and runs the outreach sequence from one dashboard is genuinely simpler for a team that wants one tool, and its MCP server means an AI assistant can drive that whole workflow conversationally.

Hunter's verifier is also a real verifier, not a placeholder feature, with a self-reported sub-1% bounce rate on addresses it marks valid and a catch-all methodology it's published research on. If the entire job is finding leads and running one campaign against a list built this week, InboxPolicy's per-call send-decision model doesn't add much on top of that.

Find with Hunter, decide with InboxPolicy

The workflow that makes both tools useful at once: use Hunter's Domain Search or Discover to find candidate addresses and build the list, then call InboxPolicy at actual send time for a fresh send/send_with_caution/review/retry_later/avoid decision on each address before it goes out. This matters because a verification result ages, an address Hunter verified valid three weeks ago when the list was built can have bounced, changed, or gone catch-all by the time an agent or campaign actually sends to it. Splitting discovery cost (Hunter's monthly credits) from the decision that protects sender reputation (InboxPolicy's $0.01 per-call check, cached free for 72 hours on repeat checks) is a reasonable way to run both without paying twice for the same thing.

Frequently asked questions

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See also: full pricing breakdown and API documentation.