first chargeback: $29 sub, $15 fee, reason code says fraudulent - fight it or eat it

Fraudulent means the cardholder told their bank they did not authorise the charge. It is often not fraud at all - it is a person who did not recognise a line on a statement, or a spouse, or someone who could not find your cancel button and used the bank as an unsubscribe.

Evidence that has actually worked for me on that code: the IP and device fingerprint at signup next to the IP at the disputed charge, the account email with the domain matching the company, timestamps of activity after the disputed charge, and a copy of the receipt email with the exact string that appears on the statement. Usage after the charge is the strongest single item, because it directly contradicts "I never authorised this".

What has never worked: an angry paragraph, screenshots of your terms without showing they accepted them, and anything that requires the reviewer to reason about your product.

One route people forget: contact the customer directly, calmly, and ask them to withdraw. Disputes can be withdrawn by the cardholder through their bank and there is a documented path for it on the processor side.

I emailed a disputer once with the login timestamps and a line saying no hard feelings, I will refund you right now if you call your bank and drop the dispute. They did. It still cost me the fee, but it stopped a loss going on my record.

Do the arithmetic on your own dashboard before you decide, because the fee structure is not one number. Stripe's published pricing lists a fee for receiving a dispute and a separate fee for countering one, both fifteen dollars on standard US pricing at the time I am writing this. What that means for your net if you win depends on which of those apply to your account, and the dashboard shows it on the dispute itself. Do not take a blog post's word for it, including mine - open the dispute and read the fee lines.

The other thing to know: you get one submission. Stripe forwards your evidence and files to the issuing bank immediately and you cannot edit or add to it afterwards. So do not fire off a half-built response at 1am.

Then the issuer takes their time. Expect the outcome in the range of two to two and a half months, not days.

Politely disagreeing with everyone telling you to fight this one.

The money is not the issue at 44 customers. The ratio is. Card networks run monitoring programmes with thresholds that sit around the one percent mark, and the exact numbers differ per network and change, so look them up rather than trusting a number in a forum post. The point is that at your volume, two disputes in a month can put you above a threshold that was written for merchants doing thousands of transactions.

So the priority order is: stop the next one, then decide about this one. Statement descriptor that says the product name. Renewal reminder email a few days before the annual or the third monthly charge. Cancel button that works without emailing you. A refund policy you actually honour instantly, because a refund costs you $29 and a dispute costs you $29 plus fees plus ratio.

Build the evidence template once as a markdown file with placeholders. Login IPs, event log export, receipt email, descriptor screenshot, terms acceptance timestamp. Then a dispute is 15 minutes, not an hour, and the decision stops being emotional.

Two things that cut mine to near zero and neither is glamorous.

One: an email that goes out 72 hours before every renewal with the amount, the date, and a one-click cancel link. My churn went up very slightly. Disputes went from about one a month to two in the following year.

Two: instant refunds, no questions, on anything under about $60 if it is the first request. I lose maybe $150 a year to it. That is cheaper than the fee on a single dispute plus the hour I spend on evidence plus the risk of the ratio.

I still fight disputes where I have hard usage logs, mostly because losing without responding gets recorded as a loss anyway and the evidence takes 20 minutes once you have the template.