---
title: "Stripe Radar Pricing Tiers Explained: What Each Tier Really Costs at Scale"
description: "Stripe Radar now has four tiers with usage meters. The $10/month headline is just the start. See what Standard, Plus, and Pro cost at real volume."
url: https://www.corgilabs.ai/insights/stripe-radar-pricing-change
published: 2026-09-08
---

# Stripe Radar Pricing Tiers Explained: What Each Tier Really Costs at Scale

## Stripe Radar Is Not All Paid, but the Free Tier Has Limits

A U.S. merchant processing 100,000 screened transaction attempts per month on Stripe Radar Standard will pay $5,000 in fraud prevention costs alone. At 500,000, that number hits $25,000. And Standard is the cheapest paid tier.

Stripe restructured Radar in mid-2026, splitting it into four tiers: Lite, Standard, Plus, and Pro. Radar Lite remains available at no additional charge for businesses on standard Stripe Payments pricing. But the features most mid-market merchants depend on, including custom rules, granular risk scores, and manual transaction reviews, now sit behind paid tiers with per-transaction usage meters.

The headline subscription prices ($10, $14, and $20 per month) tell a fraction of the story. Your actual cost depends on how many transaction attempts Radar screens, which tier you need, and whether you choose subscription or pay-as-you-go billing.

## What Each Tier Actually Includes

The four tiers are not minor variations on the same product. Each unlock represents a distinct set of capabilities, and the feature boundaries matter more than the price gaps suggest.

**Radar Lite (included with standard Stripe Payments pricing):** AI-based card-fraud prevention, card-testing protection, and fraud alerts. No custom rules, no custom lists, no granular risk scores, no manual transaction reviews, no account-fraud tools.

**Radar Standard ($10/month or $0.05 per screened transaction):** Out-of-the-box fraud prevention across supported payment methods, fraud analytics, default rules and lists, fraud signals, and categorical risk levels.

**Radar Plus ($14/month or $0.07 per screened transaction):** Everything in Standard, plus 0–99 risk scores, custom rules and lists, backtesting, manual transaction reviews, risk preferences, Adaptive 3D Secure, Smart Refunds, Radar Assistant, and advanced analytics.

**Radar Pro ($20/month or $0.09 per screened transaction + $0.005 per screened customer):** Everything in Plus, plus dynamic risk thresholds and abuse prevention for free-trial, bot, multi-account, account-sharing, and pay-as-you-go abuse.

One detail that catches merchants off guard: the custom rules, risk scores, and manual reviews that many businesses relied on under the previous Radar pricing are **Plus features**, not Standard. A merchant moving from the old free Radar to Standard will not get those capabilities back. They need Plus at $0.07 per screened transaction attempt.

## Two Billing Models, One Critical Distinction

Stripe offers two ways to pay for each paid tier, and the difference is easy to misunderstand.

**Pay-as-you-go** charges from the first screened event. There is no monthly commitment. You pay $0.05 (Standard), $0.07 (Plus), or $0.09 (Pro) for every transaction attempt Radar evaluates.

**Subscription** starts at $10, $14, or $20 per month and includes a defined usage entitlement. Once you exceed that entitlement, overage charges apply.

Here is why this matters: the subscription is not a flat fee that covers unlimited screening. Stripe's subscription policy states that each plan includes a defined number of screens measured across transactions, active accounts, and customers. The monthly fee covers usage up to that allowance.

Simple arithmetic suggests each tier's starting subscription covers roughly 200 transaction screens (dividing $10 by $0.05, $14 by $0.07, or inferring from Pro's structure). That is an illustration, not a confirmed entitlement. But any merchant processing meaningful volume will exceed a few hundred screens within the first days of the month.

For most mid-market merchants, the effective cost is the per-transaction rate, not the subscription headline.

## The Real Cost at Scale

The per-transaction rates compound quickly. Here is what U.S. pay-as-you-go pricing looks like across all three paid tiers:

| Monthly screened transaction attempts | Standard at $0.05 | Plus at $0.07 | Pro at $0.09 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 10,000 | $500 | $700 | $900 |
| 50,000 | $2,500 | $3,500 | $4,500 |
| 100,000 | $5,000 | $7,000 | $9,000 |
| 500,000 | $25,000 | $35,000 | $45,000 |
| 1,000,000 | $50,000 | $70,000 | $90,000 |

For Pro, add $0.005 per screened customer on top of the transaction rate. A Pro merchant with 50,000 monthly customers and 100,000 screened transaction attempts would pay $9,000 in transaction fees plus $250 in customer-screening fees.

**Annual costs at 100,000 monthly screened transaction attempts:**

- Standard: $60,000/year
- Plus: $84,000/year
- Pro: $108,000/year, plus screened-customer charges

These are pay-as-you-go calculations. A subscription customer's actual invoice depends on the selected entitlement, included usage, negotiated pricing, and overage terms.

## Why "Screened Transaction Attempts" Is the Right Unit

Notice the table uses "screened transaction attempts," not "payments" or "successful transactions." That distinction matters.

Radar can screen successful payment attempts, declined attempts, blocked attempts, and transactions routed to manual review. It screens one-time payments, recurring payments, invoices, and subscription-related payment events.

Consider a card-testing attack. A fraudster submits 5,000 card numbers against your checkout in a single afternoon. Radar blocks every attempt. None result in a successful payment. But each blocked attempt is a screened transaction, and on Standard pay-as-you-go pricing, that attack could cost you up to $250 in screening fees (though Stripe's card-testing protection may intercept the attack before all attempts are individually billed).

For recurring billing, there is a partial relief: the first subscription payment and the first payment after a payment-method change are screened, but merchants can configure how many successful renewal cycles Radar continues to screen. Renewals that skip screening do not incur a charge.

## The January 2027 Deadline: What It Means and What It Doesn't

Affected U.S. merchants who received Stripe's migration notice in 2026 are on a trial of Radar Standard through January 22, 2027. According to the notice, accounts that do not switch to Lite will continue on Standard at $0.05 per screened transaction after the trial ends.

Two important clarifications.

First, this is a pay-as-you-go transition, not automatic enrollment in Stripe's separate $10 monthly subscription. Merchants who do nothing will begin paying per-transaction rates, not a subscription fee.

Second, available rollout notices indicate this applies to affected U.S. accounts. It should not be generalized to every Stripe merchant worldwide. Markets outside the U.S. have their own pricing structures and timelines.

The merchant reaction has been sharp. One user on a community forum wrote: "They've moved me to a 'Standard' Radar plan because it's 'closest' to the free plan I was on. It's free until January 2027, after which they start charging me a per transaction fee, unless I opt out."

Another Reddit r/stripe user put it more bluntly: "I didn't realize I even used Radar and archived the email after seeing the subject line." The frustration is less about the price itself and more about opt-out enrollment with a delayed billing start.

## What Radar Lite Covers and What You Lose

Downgrading to Lite is free. But "free" has boundaries.

Lite includes AI-based card-fraud prevention, card-testing protection, and fraud alerts using Stripe's default fraud logic. For a founder running a straightforward ecommerce store with low fraud rates, that baseline may be sufficient.

Here is what becomes unavailable on Lite:

- **Custom rules and custom lists** (available starting with Plus)
- **Granular 0–99 risk scores** (Plus)
- **Manual transaction reviews** (Plus)
- **Risk preferences** (Plus)
- **Adaptive 3D Secure** (Plus)
- **Backtesting and advanced analytics** (Plus)
- **Account-fraud prevention** (Standard for platforms, Plus for full capability)
- **Abuse prevention** (Pro only)

If you have built custom rules and curated block lists over months or years, those controls become unavailable on Lite. Default lists and rules remain, but merchant-configured logic does not carry over.

For a SaaS company processing thousands of recurring subscriptions on Stripe, losing custom rules and risk scores can mean losing the fraud logic tuned to your specific billing patterns. Recurring transactions look different from one-time purchases, and network-wide models may misinterpret merchant-specific renewal patterns as suspicious activity in some cases.

## Platform and Marketplace Pricing

Platform merchants face a steeper cost structure. Subscription starting prices for platforms:

| Tier | Business starts at | Platform starts at |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Standard | $10/month | $20/month |
| Plus | $14/month | $44/month |
| Pro | $20/month | $70/month |

Standard doubles for platforms. Plus is approximately 3.1 times the business price. Pro is 3.5 times.

Standard for platforms includes basic connected-account risk capabilities: AI account-fraud detection, account-risk levels, default account rules, and manual account reviews. Note that manual **account** reviews (for connected-account risk on Standard) are distinct from manual **transaction** reviews (which require Plus).

For a marketplace with thousands of connected accounts, the combination of per-transaction screening fees and platform subscription pricing can add up to a substantial fraud-prevention line item.

## When Merchant-Specific Models Add Value

Radar combines network-trained AI models, cross-merchant signals, and default or merchant-configured rules to evaluate transaction, account, and customer risk. It sees patterns across millions of Stripe merchants, and that network breadth is powerful for catching known fraud types.

But network-wide models optimize for average behavior across all merchants. If your fraud patterns diverge from the network average, a merchant-specific model captures signals that broad models miss.

In a first-party retrospective evaluation of one Stripe Connect merchant, Corgi Labs analyzed approximately 1.33 million transactions across 19 rolling out-of-time test windows. In the 10 of 19 windows that produced actionable signal, Corgi Model reduced the modeled dispute rate from 0.41% to 0.17%, a 59.5% dispute reduction. The model also recovered 5.6% of good transaction volume that would otherwise have been blocked as false declines.

Corgi Labs estimates the net revenue impact at $508,000 ($525,000 in dispute savings minus $17,000 in false-decline margin loss). Results are merchant-specific and should not be generalized without a prospective evaluation.

The practical question is whether your fraud profile looks like everyone else's or whether your business has unique transaction patterns, high-value orders, subscription billing, or category-specific risk. In the first case, Radar's network training performs well. In the second, merchant-specific models capture what network averages miss.

## A Practical Decision Framework

Your next move depends on three variables: your screened transaction volume, your current fraud rate, and which tier's features your fraud stack actually requires.

1. **Fewer than 10,000 monthly screened transaction attempts with low fraud rates:** Radar Lite is likely sufficient. If you were not actively using custom rules or risk scores, you will not notice their absence. Save the $500/month in Standard pay-as-you-go costs.
2. **10,000 to 100,000 monthly screened transaction attempts:** The $500 to $5,000 monthly Standard cost is real but manageable at this scale. Evaluate whether you need the Plus features (custom rules, risk scores, manual reviews) that many merchants assumed Standard would include. If you need them, Plus at $0.07 per screened transaction is the minimum viable tier.
3. **Over 100,000 monthly screened transaction attempts:** At $5,000/month on Standard and $7,000/month on Plus, fraud prevention becomes a significant budget line. This is the volume range where comparing the total cost of Radar against merchant-specific ML models or alternative scoring providers makes financial sense.
4. **Platform or marketplace operators:** Factor in the higher platform subscription rates and any connected-account screening charges when calculating total cost.
5. **Chargebacks consistently above 0.5%:** In Corgi Labs' experience, merchants consistently above this threshold have often outgrown what any single processor-included tool can handle. Layered approaches, including merchant-specific models, start to show measurable ROI at this level.

Whatever your situation, do not let the January 2027 deadline make the decision for you. Review your Stripe dashboard, audit which Radar features you actually use, and choose a tier deliberately.

If you want to see how a custom model performs on your specific Stripe transaction data with no development work, Corgi Labs runs evaluations on your existing data.

[Book a Demo →](https://www.corgilabs.ai/#book-demo)

## Sources

1. Stripe Radar Pricing. stripe.com/radar/pricing. Accessed August 2026.
2. Stripe Radar. stripe.com/radar. Accessed August 2026.
3. Stripe Docs: How Radar Works. docs.stripe.com/radar/how-radar-works. Accessed August 2026.
4. Stripe Subscription Policy. stripe.com/legal/subscription-policy. Accessed August 2026.
5. Stripe Pricing. stripe.com/pricing. Accessed August 2026.
6. Stripe Blog: Expanding Stripe Radar to Protect More of Your Business. stripe.com/blog/expanding-stripe-radar-to-protect-more-of-your-business. May 2026.
7. Squarespace Forum: New Stripe Radar Plans and Pricing. forum.squarespace.com/topic/349568. July 2026.
8. Reddit r/stripe: Stripe Is About to Start Making You Pay for Your Free Radar Protection. July 2026.
9. Reddit r/stripe: Carding Attempts Getting Charged per Failed Attempt. 2026.
10. Corgi Labs: Custom Fraud Model Evaluation on Top of Stripe Radar Connect. corgilabs.ai/insights/corgi-custom-fraud-model-stripe-radar-connect-2. May 19, 2026.

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