Question 1

What is the difference between a fraud screening fee and a chargeback guarantee fee?

Accepted Answer

Screening tools like Stripe Radar and Sift charge you to score a transaction's risk and hand you a recommendation to approve, decline or review — but you still make the final call, and if you approve a transaction that turns out to be fraudulent, you eat the chargeback. Guarantee tools like Riskified and Signifyd flip that liability: they charge a percentage of the order value on transactions they approve, and in exchange they reimburse you dollar-for-dollar if an order they told you to approve turns out to be fraudulent. That is why guarantee fees are quoted as a percent of GMV rather than a flat per-check price — the vendor is pricing an insurance product, not just a lookup, so the fee has to cover their own expected payout on the fraud they miss. Screening fees are cheaper on the sticker but leave the tail risk with you; guarantee fees cost more per order but cap your fraud losses at a known percentage.

Question 2

When does a chargeback guarantee become cheaper than screening plus eating the losses?

Accepted Answer

It comes down to your actual fraud chargeback rate as a percent of GMV compared to the guarantee vendor's fee percentage. If your fraud losses currently run below roughly 0.3 to 0.5 percent of revenue, a screening tool like Stripe Radar or Sift plus eating the occasional chargeback is usually cheaper than paying a 0.3 to 1.2 percent guarantee fee on every single approved order, guaranteed or not. But if your fraud rate is elevated — new geographies, high-ticket items, digital goods, or a period of coordinated attack — the guarantee fee is fixed and predictable while your uncovered loss keeps climbing with every fraudulent order that slips through, and at some crossover point the guarantee becomes the cheaper, safer option. This calculator computes your GMV-based chargeback loss at your inputs and compares it directly against both models so you can see which side of that crossover you are on.

Question 3

Why do Riskified and Signifyd charge different percentages of GMV?

Accepted Answer

Riskified typically prices around 0.6 to 1.2 percent of approved order value and Signifyd around 0.3 to 0.6 percent of covered order value, and the gap mostly comes down to what is covered and how each vendor underwrites risk. Riskified's model is built around approving more borderline orders (better conversion) and pricing the fee to cover the extra risk that comes with a more permissive approval engine. Signifyd's published range tends to run lower per merchant category and often adjusts by industry vertical and order profile — high-risk categories like electronics, gift cards or luxury goods carry a higher effective rate than low-risk categories like subscriptions or services. Neither vendor publishes an exact rate card publicly; both require a quote based on your order mix, average order value, geography and historical chargeback rate, so the percentages here are representative ranges rather than a specific contract price.

Question 4

Does Sift's per-event fee include a chargeback guarantee?

Accepted Answer

No. Sift is a risk-scoring and decisioning platform, not an insurance product — it prices a base platform fee plus a per-event rate that covers API calls, model scoring and workflow modules, and overage traffic beyond your contracted quota typically bills 20 to 50 percent above the base per-event rate. You still make the approve or decline decision and you still carry the loss if you approve something Sift flagged as risky (or missed entirely). That is the same liability shape as Stripe Radar, just with a different fee structure — a fixed base fee plus metered events instead of a flat per-screen rate — which is why both are grouped as screening-only tools in this calculator rather than guarantee tools.

Question 5

Is Stripe Radar cheaper if I already process payments through Stripe?

Accepted Answer

Often yes. Radar's fraud-scoring engine is included at no extra charge for transactions you already process through Stripe Payments — you are only billed the standalone Radar for Fraud Teams rate (roughly $0.02 to $0.07 per screened transaction in published estimates) if you want the advanced rules engine, team review queues, or if you are screening transactions that are not processed through Stripe itself, such as orders authorized by a different processor. This calculator models the standalone per-screen rate since it is the directly comparable cost to Sift's per-event fee and the guarantee vendors' per-order fee; if your transactions already flow through Stripe Payments, your real incremental Radar cost may be lower than shown here.

Question 6

Should I use a screening tool and a guarantee tool together?

Accepted Answer

Some merchants do, but it is usually redundant spend rather than layered protection, because guarantee vendors run their own internal risk scoring as part of the product you are already paying the percent-of-GMV fee for. A more common pattern is to start with a screening tool like Stripe Radar (near-zero marginal cost, included with Stripe payments) while chargeback rates are low, and graduate to a guarantee vendor like Riskified or Signifyd once volume, average order value or fraud exposure grows enough that a single bad quarter of chargebacks would cost more than a year of guarantee fees. Running both simultaneously mainly makes sense if you want a screening tool's manual review queue for orders the guarantee vendor's automated engine sends to review, or if contractual terms require you to demonstrate your own fraud controls on top of the guarantee.

Calculadora de costos de API de detección de fraude

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Tarifa de selección, cuota+excedente o porcentaje del GMV: tres facturas diferentes para el mismo trabajo

Cómo funciona esta calculadora

Preguntas frecuentes

¿Cuál es la diferencia entre una tarifa de selección y una tarifa de garantía de contracargo?

¿Cuándo una garantía resulta más barata que el screening más pérdidas?

¿Por qué Riskified y Signifyd cobran porcentajes diferentes?

¿Sift incluye una garantía de devolución de cargo?

¿Stripe Radar es más barato si ya uso Stripe Payments?

¿Debo ejecutar una herramienta de detección y una herramienta de garantía juntas?