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Smart Disputes fee passthroughPrivate preview

Learn how to pass through or mark up Smart Dispute fees to your connected accounts.

Platforms can enable Smart Disputes for their connected accounts to automatically contest disputes on their behalf. If your platform pays dispute fees, you can pass through or mark up Smart Dispute fees to your connected accounts using Smart Disputes fee passthrough. This helps you offer automated dispute management and monetize Smart Disputes instead of absorbing dispute costs.

Eligibility

Your platform can use the Smart Disputes fee passthrough capability when all of the following are true:

  1. You’ve enabled Smart Disputes for your connected accounts.
  2. Your platform pays Smart Disputes fees, not your connected accounts.
  3. Your connected accounts use direct or destination charges, not separate charges and transfers.
  4. Your platform and connected accounts are in a region that allows account debits.

Fee payer configuration for direct charges

With some platform configurations, the connected account pays dispute fees. For direct charges, this happens when the fee payer trait is set to application_unified_accounts_beta. Contact sales if you want to change this behavior and use Smart Dispute fee passthrough to control Smart Disputes pricing for your connected accounts instead.

Set pricing

Configure default pricing across all eligible connected accounts in the Smart Disputes tab of the no-code platform pricing tool.

You can set pricing to be a percentage of the dispute transaction amount, up to 50 percent. In the editor, choose one of the following options:

  • Set your sell-rate.
  • Pass fees through.
  • Don’t pass fees through.

You can also customize pricing for an individual connected account in the Monetization section of the connected accounts page in the Dashboard.

After you set pricing, tell your connected accounts that Smart Disputes is enabled and that pricing matches the sell rate you set in the platform pricing tool.

Negative balance liability

You can use Smart Disputes fee passthrough to debit connected accounts even when the connected account balance is negative. The behavior depends on your platform’s negative balance liability configuration.

  • If the connected account’s balance is negative and Stripe holds negative balance liability, the platform can still collect funds through dispute fee passthrough.
  • If the connected account’s balance is negative and your platform holds negative balance liability, Stripe draws down your platform reserve balance to collect funds through dispute fee passthrough.

Testing

After your platform configures pricing, test Smart Disputes and the fee passthrough by creating a test smart dispute and submit evidence with winning_evidence.

Create a charge that’s eligible for Smart Disputes:

Command Line
cURL
Stripe CLI
Ruby
Python
PHP
Java
Node.js
Go
.NET
No results
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -H "Stripe-Account: 
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
" \
  -d amount=5000 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d source=tok_createAutoRepresentmentEligibleDispute

Then, fetch the dispute on the resulting charge:

Command Line
cURL
Stripe CLI
Ruby
Python
PHP
Java
Node.js
Go
.NET
No results
curl -G https://api.stripe.com/v1/disputes \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -H "Stripe-Version: 2025-11-17.preview" \
  -H "Stripe-Account: 
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
" \
  -d charge=
"{{CHARGE_ID}}"

To resolve the dispute as won, submit the dispute identifier through Smart Disputes with winning_evidence.

Command Line
cURL
Stripe CLI
Ruby
Python
PHP
Java
Node.js
Go
.NET
No results
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/disputes/
{{DISPUTE_ID}}
 \
  -u "
sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2
:" \
  -H "Stripe-Version: 2025-11-17.preview" \
  -H "Stripe-Account: 
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
" \
  -d intended_submission_method=smart_disputes \
  -d "evidence[uncategorized_text]"=winning_evidence

The dispute moves to the won status. You might need to fetch the dispute again to see the updated status.

Stripe invoices the Smart Disputes fee to your platform within 24 hours. Stripe passes the fee to the connected account within an additional 6 hours.

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