Stripe Radar vs Sift vs Riskified: Real AI Fraud Prevention Cost per 100,000 Transactions in 2026
Fraud prevention is the rare software category where the cheapest tool by monthly invoice can be the most expensive by total cost, because the software fee is only half the equation. The other half — fraud losses the tool didn't catch, and legitimate customers it wrongly blocked — never appears on the vendor's invoice at all. This article prices the three tools, then prices the two costs their invoices don't show.
The short answer
Stripe Radar has genuinely public, transaction-based pricing following a mid-2026 restructure into four tiers: Lite (included free), Standard ($0.05/screened transaction), Plus ($0.07), and Pro ($0.09, plus $0.005 per screened customer). Sift does not publish standard list pricing, but one confirmed structured listing shows a $833.33/month subscription plus $0.01/unit usage fee — a real, citable price point, though not confirmed as Sift's general rate card. Riskified does not publish pricing either; it's reported to charge roughly 0.4% of approved transaction value as a performance-based fee that includes a 100% chargeback guarantee, functioning more like an insurance premium than a software subscription. At 100,000 transactions a month with a $75 average order value, Riskified's reported fee (~$30,000/month) is roughly 3–6x Stripe Radar's Standard-tier cost and 15x Sift's reported structured rate — a real premium that only makes sense once the value of its chargeback guarantee is priced in separately.
What's publicly known, by vendor
| Stripe Radar | Sift | Riskified | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public rate card | Yes, restructured mid-2026 into four tiers | Partial — one structured listing found; no general public rate card | None |
| Free tier | Radar Lite, included at no extra charge on standard Stripe payments pricing | Reported historically as free for roughly 95% of e-commerce merchants (first 10,000 transactions/month free, under one cent per transaction average for higher-volume accounts) | Not applicable — performance-based fee from the first transaction |
| Standard rate | $0.05/screened transaction (Standard tier) | Not confirmed as a general per-transaction rate; one Google Cloud Marketplace listing shows $833.33/month base plus $0.01/unit | Reported ~0.4% of approved transaction value |
| Advanced rate | $0.07/screened transaction (Plus tier: custom rules, manual review, risk scoring, Adaptive 3D Secure); $0.09/screened transaction (Pro tier), plus $0.005 per screened customer | Not published | Not applicable — single reported rate structure |
| Chargeback guarantee | Not included — Radar reduces fraud but doesn't assume liability | Not included in standard pricing; buyers can reportedly negotiate risk-sharing or purchase separate chargeback insurance | Included — 100% chargeback guarantee on approved orders, plus a "Dispute Resolve" service that files reimbursement claims on the merchant's behalf |
| Chargeback fee (underlying processor) | $15 per dispute, charged by Stripe regardless of outcome, on top of any Radar fee | Not applicable to Sift's own fee structure | Not applicable — absorbed into Riskified's guarantee |
| Migration context | Merchants who received Stripe's 2026 migration notice are on a trial of Radar Standard through January 22, 2027, after which per-transaction billing begins automatically for those who take no action | Not applicable | Not applicable |
Cost at three transaction volumes
Stripe Radar figures are calculated directly from its published per-transaction rates. Sift's figure applies the one confirmed structured listing found ($833.33/month base + $0.01/transaction), labeled as a specific reported price point rather than a confirmed general rate. Riskified's figure applies its reported ~0.4% rate to an illustrative $75 average order value.
| Transactions/month | Stripe Radar Standard ($0.05) | Stripe Radar Plus ($0.07) | Stripe Radar Pro ($0.09) | Sift (reported structured rate) | Riskified (reported ~0.4% of GMV, $75 AOV) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $500/month | $700/month | $900/month | ~$933/month | ~$3,000/month |
| 100,000 | $5,000/month | $7,000/month | $9,000/month | ~$1,833/month | ~$30,000/month |
| 1,000,000 | $50,000/month | $70,000/month | $90,000/month | ~$10,833/month | ~$300,000/month |
Riskified's reported cost runs dramatically higher than either Stripe Radar or the one confirmed Sift data point at every volume — but Riskified is pricing a fundamentally different product: liability transfer, not just detection. Sift's figure should be treated cautiously, since it comes from a single structured third-party listing rather than a confirmed general list price, and Sift itself has previously marketed a "free for 95% of merchants, under a penny per transaction for the rest" positioning that doesn't fully reconcile with the $833.33 base fee shown in that listing.
The calculation the invoice doesn't show: prevented fraud loss
None of these tools' value shows up on their own invoice — it shows up as fraud that didn't happen. As a formula: potential fraud exposure = transaction volume × fraud rate × average order value × loss multiplier (covering the lost goods, the $15 chargeback fee, and any card-network penalty). Using illustrative assumptions of a 1% fraud attack rate, a $75 average order value, and a 2.5x loss multiplier:
| Transactions/month | Illustrative total fraud exposure if entirely unprotected | Stripe Radar Standard cost | Fraud loss needed to prevent to cover Radar's own fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $18,750 | $500 | 2.7% of total exposure |
| 100,000 | $187,500 | $5,000 | 2.7% of total exposure |
| 1,000,000 | $1,875,000 | $50,000 | 2.7% of total exposure |
At this illustrative fraud rate, Stripe Radar's Standard tier needs to catch only about 2.7% of the total fraud exposure to pay for its own fee — a genuinely low bar, since even a modestly effective fraud model catches far more than that in practice. This is why fraud-prevention software is rarely a hard sell on pure math once a company has any measurable fraud rate at all; the harder question, addressed below, is what the tool costs in legitimate revenue it blocks by mistake.
The other hidden cost: false positives
A fraud system that blocks legitimate customers loses revenue even when its software fee is low, and this cost is structurally invisible on any vendor's invoice. As an illustration, at a 2% false-positive rate (a plausible, if illustrative, rate for an aggressively tuned system) and the same $75 average order value:
| Transactions/month | Illustrative legitimate revenue blocked (2% false-positive rate) |
|---|---|
| 10,000 | $15,000/month |
| 100,000 | $150,000/month |
| 1,000,000 | $1,500,000/month |
At this illustrative rate, false-positive losses dwarf every vendor's software fee at every volume modeled — meaning the real cost comparison between these three tools is not primarily about the per-transaction price at all, but about which one has the lower false-positive rate for a given business's actual customer base and transaction patterns. A more expensive tool with meaningfully better precision can be cheaper in total cost than a cheaper tool that blocks more good customers, and no published price comparison captures this without a real-world pilot.
Why Riskified's fee is structured like insurance, not software
Riskified's reported ~0.4% rate, applied only to approved transaction value, prices the transfer of fraud-loss liability directly into every approved order — the merchant pays a known, budgetable cost instead of carrying unpredictable fraud-loss exposure. This converts fraud from a variable, potentially catastrophic cost into a fixed line item, which is a genuine risk-management benefit independent of whether Riskified's detection accuracy is actually better than Stripe Radar's or Sift's. A merchant comparing Riskified's $30,000/month figure against Stripe Radar's $5,000/month figure at 100,000 transactions is not comparing two prices for the same product — one is a detection tool, the other is detection plus an insurance policy against exactly the kind of loss this article's fraud-exposure calculation illustrates.
What the advertised price misses
- Stripe's own $15 chargeback fee applies regardless of Radar tier or outcome — even a chargeback Stripe or the merchant successfully disputes still costs $15, a real cost on top of whatever Radar tier is active.
- Merchants on Stripe's migration trial should confirm their plan before January 22, 2027, since taking no action moves the account onto per-transaction Radar Standard billing automatically rather than continuing on whatever pricing preceded the mid-2026 restructure.
- Sift's reported "free for 95% of merchants" positioning and the $833.33/month structured listing found in this research are not fully reconciled — a company evaluating Sift should confirm current pricing directly rather than relying on either figure, since they describe what may be different tiers, different eras of Sift's pricing, or different deal structures.
- Riskified's 0.4% reported rate applies only to approved transactions — a merchant with a high decline rate (whether from Riskified's own screening or elsewhere) pays the fee on a smaller base than total transaction volume, meaning the simple volume-times-rate calculation in this article's scenario table is an approximation, not an exact prediction.
Which tool fits which risk profile
- A Stripe-native merchant wanting integrated, transparently priced fraud screening without a chargeback guarantee: Stripe Radar, sized to the tier (Standard, Plus, or Pro) matching the sophistication of manual review and custom rules actually needed.
- A merchant wanting to convert unpredictable fraud-loss exposure into a fixed, budgetable cost, particularly in a high-value or high-fraud-risk vertical (luxury goods, ticketing, electronics): Riskified, accepting its reported premium as the price of the chargeback guarantee specifically.
- A merchant wanting granular, API-driven fraud scoring without a bundled guarantee, and willing to negotiate a custom package: Sift, though budgeting requires a direct quote given the genuine gap between its historical "free for most merchants" positioning and the one confirmed structured price point found in this research.
- Any merchant evaluating any of the three: measure the actual false-positive rate on a real transaction sample before committing, since that number is very likely to move total cost more than the published or reported per-transaction rate.
Limitations and uncertainty
Stripe Radar's tiered pricing is confirmed directly from Stripe's own pricing documentation, following its mid-2026 restructure. Sift does not publish general list pricing; the $833.33/month plus $0.01/unit figure used in this article's scenarios comes from a single structured third-party listing (a Google Cloud Marketplace product page) and should not be treated as Sift's confirmed general rate. Riskified does not publish pricing; its reported ~0.4% rate comes from third-party competitive analysis. The fraud-exposure and false-positive-cost calculations in this article are illustrative, using assumed fraud rates, false-positive rates, average order values, and loss multipliers that are not vendor-reported statistics — a real business's actual fraud and false-positive rates will differ, likely substantially, from the illustrative figures used here.
Sources
Checked late September 2026. Stripe Radar: stripe.com/pricing, Stripe's Radar tier documentation. Sift and Riskified do not publish general pricing; figures used are drawn from a structured third-party marketplace listing (Sift) and multiple independent competitive analyses (Riskified).