I'm running a small SaaS with a $5.99/month subscription. Nothing crazy, just a side project that finally started paying for itself.

Today, I got a dispute notification. A customer who signed up in April filed a chargeback on their May payment, claiming "the account owner did not authorize the purchase." The funny part is that my SaaS has daily quota tracking, so I have all the usage for that user: timestamps, actions, everything. He also used two very similar but different emails, one on my website and one at Stripe checkout, which makes me think this most likely isn't a stolen card or a hijacked Link account.

So I opened the dispute page ready to fight it. Not because I didn't want to refund him, but on principle: paying for something, using it (a lot), and then charging it back as an "unauthorized purchase"? I've received a few emails in the past from customers kindly asking for a refund because they forgot to cancel the auto-renewal, or simply because they weren't happy with the service, and I've always fully refunded them, even retroactively, despite losing the small Stripe fee in the process (~$0.50). That's totally fine, and I'm happy to refund those customers.

I was not prepared for what came next.

I had the login records, the IP, the email confirmations, the whole thing. And then I looked at the payment breakdown:

• Payment amount: $5.99
• Dispute amount: -€5.26
• Fees: -€20.52
• Net: -€20.66

That fee is the chargeback fee. Roughly $15 USD, and it's non-refundable. Meaning: even if I counter the dispute, gather my evidence, submit it, wait weeks, and win, I still eat the fee. The best possible outcome of fighting is that I get $5.99 back and I'm still down about $15. Worst case, I'm down 35.99$.

I genuinely sat there for a minute thinking I was misreading it. I wasn't.

Even worse, this customer disputed his 2nd payment out of 4, so what's next? Two more disputes? That's -$45 in fees on a $5.99/month subscription. I ended up fully refunding the other 3 months and crossing my fingers that no more disputes come from that customer.

The math is brutal for anyone selling small-ticket items. On a $5.99 charge, a single chargeback costs me the equivalent of three customers.

I understand why the fee exists. Processing a dispute costs the card networks and the processor real money, and the fee is a deterrent against merchants who rack up chargebacks. Fine. But it's a flat fee applied to a percentage-based problem, which means it lands with completely different weight depending on what you sell. If you sell $500 furniture, a $15 fee is annoying. If you sell $5.99 subscriptions, it's a punishment for being disputed at all, regardless of whether you did anything wrong.

What would you guys do in my place? Is Stripe the right platform for a small business like mine? And should I expect more and more chargebacks in the future?

Thanks for reading.

We are noticing that card issuers are not accepting liability for disputes arising from transactions authorized via 3D Secure challenge.

We've lost 9 fraud disputes totaling $2,660 (plus dispute fees) that had full 3DS ECI 05 authentication and were lost anyway.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Edit:

Found a support response to us questioning why we received a chargeback for fraud when the transaction was authenticated (in this case, we won the dispute):

Upon checking, I can confirm that the disputed payment - [REDACTED] had indeed passed the 3D Secure authentication. Though there's what we call the liability shift, which is a rule that applies to payments that are successfully authenticated using 3D Secure, wherein, if a cardholder disputes a 3DS payment as fraudulent, the liability shifts from you to the card issuer.

However, we should not specifically rely on this as "Liability shift" is not a policy and it's not an enforceable rule or law. Liability shift refers to the conceptual understanding around which party (the issuer or acquirer) should own liability for a dispute. Effectively, where the liability should be shifted to when a dispute is raised on a transaction because certain things happened.

Having said this, the disputed payments can still occur even if they pass the 3D Secure (3DS) authentication. While passing 3DS adds an extra layer of security to the payment process, disputes can still happen for various reasons. I'm afraid to share that in rare cases, the liability shift might get downgraded post-authorisation, or the card networks’ dispute rejection system might fail to catch the liability shift for a transaction. In these cases, if you counter the dispute, Stripe automatically adds the requested ECI and the 3DS authentication outcome for the payment to your evidence details, but we encourage you to include additional details to improve your odds of winning the dispute.

I've been using Stripe for quite a while, but their recent dispute fee changes have me looking at other options.

I'm not trying to avoid chargebacks—I understand they're part of running a business. What concerns me is paying hundreds of dollars just because a dispute is opened, even before it's resolved. If someone intentionally files disputes, those fees can add up very quickly.

I have a US LLC but I'm not a US resident. Has anyone in a similar situation successfully switched to another processor?

I'm mainly looking for:

• Good support for non-resident US LLCs
• Reliable merchant support
• Subscription/API support
• Fair dispute handling and transparent pricing

I'd really appreciate hearing from people with firsthand experience rather than affiliate recommendations.