Chargeback.io vs Riskified: different jobs, not rivals
Chargeback.io vs Riskified comes down to timing, not competition. Riskified scores an order before you ship it and pays you back if an approved order charges back later. Chargeback.io catches a dispute after the sale, before the bank turns it into a chargeback, and refunds it for you.
I've spent years opening up merchants' processor setups in a chargeback support role, and that star-ratings comparison never once decided anything. What decided it was the moment in the sale where a merchant was losing money.
By the end of this you'll know which of the two fits your gap, or whether you need both.
Key takeaways
- 01Screen orders at checkout with one tool, catch disputes with the other.
- 02Expect a guarantee to pay out only on orders it approved.
- 03Budget $29 for a Mastercard alert and $15 for a Visa one.
- 04Ask for a quote, because guarantee vendors publish no rate card.
- 05Cut your dispute rate the way one merchant did, to 0.16%.
- 06Run both tools to cover the checkout and the dispute separately.
Want to price the prevention side first? See our per-alert rates before you book a demo with anyone.
What does Riskified actually do?
Riskified screens an order for fraud before it ships, and its guarantee plan takes the chargeback on any approved order that turns out fraudulent. The decision happens at checkout, in real time.
Riskified reads the signals attached to a transaction, then returns an approve or decline. It weighs four in particular:
- The card, including its issuing bank and country.
- The addresses, billing and shipping, and whether they agree.
- The device placing the order, and its history.
- The order value, read against what you normally sell.
On the guarantee plan, that approval moves the chargeback liability to Riskified. You pay a fee on approved orders rather than on the ones it turned away. Our guide to chargeback protection tools compares that model against the other categories you can buy.
The guarantee follows the approval, and that's also where it stops. Riskified defines the covered event as an approved order that turns out fraudulent. An order it never scored carries no guarantee, and neither does an order you pushed through by hand after Riskified declined it.
That matters more than it sounds. Merchants override declines all the time, usually on a repeat customer they recognize or a large order they don't want to lose. Every one of those sits outside the guarantee.
Override the decision and you own the outcome.
What's the real difference from Riskified?
Riskified approves or declines an order before it ships, and we catch a dispute after the sale, before it turns into a chargeback. Same customer, same card, two different moments.
Riskified's work is finished at checkout, before the sale is a completed sale at all. Ours starts later.
Your customer calls their bank to dispute a charge. Before it opens a chargeback, the bank sends a pre-dispute alert through Ethoca or Verifi. We match that alert to the original transaction and refund the order, so no chargeback ever gets recorded against you.
The window between the alert and the chargeback is short, usually a day or two, which is why the refund has to fire automatically. Nobody clears that window by hand across a weekend. Our explainer on how a chargeback alert works walks through what each network sends and when.
That gap between the two moments is why merchants end up buying both. Riskified can cut the number of risky orders you approve. A legitimate order can still be disputed weeks later, over a charge the customer doesn't recognize or a renewal they forgot.
The customer who disputes that renewal was never a fraud signal at checkout. No screening tool would have flagged them, because at the time there was nothing to flag.
Does the guarantee cover what alerts catch?
No. Riskified's guarantee pays out only on orders it approved, while we get the alert whether or not a fraud tool screened the order. The two get their coverage from different places.
Riskified's guarantee is a contract tied to its own decision, so the order has to have gone through Riskified for the payout to exist.
Our alerts come from the bank instead. RDR and CDRN send us the dispute notification directly. So the alert fires on any transaction your customer disputes, including orders that never touched a screening tool.
In Chargeback.io's Dropship.io case study, RDR and CDRN alerts moved the dispute rate from 0.93% to 0.16% in one quarter. Dropship.io sells a free trial that converts to paid, so renewals customers had forgotten drove most of the disputes. Their chargeback rate had been sitting close to Stripe's limit.
All of those transactions had already cleared that merchant's own checkout, whatever screening it ran.
Both products have a scope limit. Riskified only covers what it approved, and our alerts miss some disputes too. Wallet payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Stripe Link are harder to tie back to the original charge. Some banks skip the alert and file the chargeback anyway.
Chargeback.io vs Riskified pricing, compared
We publish a per-alert price with no monthly minimum, and Riskified quotes every merchant privately. Here is what each side bills, per our own published rate card:
| Chargeback.io | Riskified | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per alert, pay per use | Percentage of approved order value |
| Per-unit cost | $29 Ethoca, $15 RDR, $15 CDRN | Not published, quoted per merchant |
| Monthly minimum | None | Estimated around $3,000/month for smaller merchants |
| Contract | No contract | Annual contract, quote-based |
| What you pay for | Each dispute the alert stops | Each order Riskified approves |
That Riskified number is CardFellow's estimate. The real figure moves with your order value and your category, so ask for a quote before you budget against it.
The two models bill on different things, which is what makes them hard to compare directly. A percentage of approved order value scales with your revenue, so it costs more in a good month whether or not your disputes went up. A per-alert price scales with your disputes instead. Fix the descriptor that was causing half of them and your bill drops the same month.
One more thing worth knowing. SourceForge's comparison of the two lists our alerts at $35, and our published rates are $29 and $15.
Our alert pricing is published in full, so you can do this math before you talk to anyone.
Is Riskified worth it if you already have chargeback alerts?
Riskified earns its cost when your problem is bad orders getting approved at checkout. An alert can only act once a sale has already happened.
By the time we see a dispute, the order shipped and the money moved. If that order was fraudulent from the start, refunding it stops the chargeback and its fee. You're still out the product.
Screening at checkout is what stops that order from being approved in the first place.
Check which problem you actually have before you buy for the other one. Pull your last quarter of disputes and read the reason codes.
In the setups I looked at, they clustered on charges nobody recognized and subscriptions customers thought they'd cancelled, and a screening gap explained almost none of them.
That's your billing descriptor and your renewal emails talking. Set the descriptor to your store name plus a support number. Send a renewal notice a few days before you bill, then run alerts against whatever disputes are left.
For that merchant, those three fixes solve more than a guarantee will, at a fraction of the spend.
Which one should you use?
Use Riskified to approve fewer bad orders, use us to catch the disputes on good ones, and use both if you want the whole transaction covered. Pick based on which of those two losses is bigger for you.
Riskified's guarantee pays out only on an order it approved. Our alert fires only on a dispute that already exists. So running both never bills you twice for one event. One tool narrows what gets through checkout, and the other cleans up what comes back.
Small order values and thin margins may not clear Riskified's estimated pricing floor. A fee charged on order value is hard to justify at that size, whatever the fit.
Alerts plus a standing rule to hand-check any order well above your average order value cover more ground for the money. Our chargeback prevention ROI calculator puts a number on what your current dispute volume costs before you decide.
Revisit that call when your order values climb or a fraud pattern shows up that no descriptor fix explains. That's the point where paying a percentage to move the risk off your books starts to pencil out.
How we sourced our data
The per-alert pricing and Dropship.io dispute-rate figures in this article come from Chargeback.io's own published rate card and case-study data. The Riskified pricing floor is a third-party estimate from CardFellow. It is labeled as such wherever it appears.
FAQ
Who owns Riskified?
Riskified is a publicly traded company listed on Nasdaq under the ticker RSKD. No parent company owns it.
Is Riskified free?
No. Riskified charges a fee based on the value of the orders it approves, and it publishes no free tier.
Do you need fraud screening if you use Chargeback.io?
Yes, if fraudulent orders are getting approved. Alerts catch disputes on sales that already went through, so they never stop a bad order at checkout.
Can you use Riskified and chargeback alerts together?
Yes. The two run independently, and nothing in one interferes with the other's decisions.
