Digital trust & safety · comparison
Sift vs FeeGuard: digital trust scoring vs ledger-level recovery
Prevention stops bad transactions before they settle. This page is about good transactions that settle correctly and then strand money on the way back out. Sift genuinely reduces the first category; nothing it does touches the second.
What Sift does
fraud-decisioning and digital-trust platform with developer-friendly APIs. Source: https://sift.com.
That is real capability in its lane — and the lanes below show precisely where it ends.
Everything said here about Sift is summarised from its own public materials at the link above, never from private knowledge of how it works inside. Products change; if any line has gone out of date, tell us at feeguard@teamveristria.com and we will correct the page rather than argue about it.
Side by side: FeeGuard vs Sift
Eight capabilities a Connect platform needs. No empty cells — every row states what each product actually does.
| Capability | FeeGuard | Sift |
|---|---|---|
| Unreversed-transfer detection | Yes — computed on every `charge.refunded` event: proportional expectation, rounding tolerance, ratio clamping | No — scoring scope. |
| Application-fee leak detection | Yes — application fees tested against reversals via Net Platform Margin; zero- and three-decimal currencies handled | No — fees untouched. |
| Dispute-loss clawback support | Yes — recoverable figure computed on `dispute.closed` (transfer remainder, fee excluded); early warning on `created`; gated automation | No — disputes minimal. |
| Cross-border FX monitoring | Yes — realised rates measured against same-day currency-pair baselines; directional loss flagging beyond 0.8% | No — fX untouched. |
| Runs on your live Stripe Connect account today | Yes — read-only restricted key, roughly ten minutes to first findings, revocable anytime | Depends on deployment |
| Performs recovery actions | One-click manual reversals (free tier); risk-gated automation with idempotency keys on Monitor Pro | Varies by product |
| Evidence & audit trail | Append-only trail on every action; finding-level evidence ids exportable as CSV | Varies by product |
| Pricing model | Detection and the 90-day lookback free · monitoring is a subscription from $49/mo · success fee only when eligible funds are recovered | See vendor site |
Where Sift genuinely wins
- — Developer-friendly scoring APIs.
- — Breadth of trust-and-safety signals.
Why platforms choose FeeGuard over Sift
- After settlement, not before it. Prevention and post-settlement recovery never contend for the same event, so neither displaces the other.
- All four vectors, natively. Unreversed transfers, kept fees, uncovered dispute losses and FX drag are separate detectors with separate arithmetic, not one heuristic wearing four labels.
- Free before you pay anyone. Detection and the 90-day lookback cost nothing — measure your stranded dollars before committing to any vendor, including us.
- Ten-minute, read-only setup. One restricted key you create and revoke; no migration, no seller re-onboarding, no payment-path changes.
- Recovery is billed on results. The success fee applies only to dollars actually recovered and confirmed in Stripe — if nothing recovers, nothing bills.
- Evidence-grade trail. Append-only logs with finding-level arithmetic — ready for controllers, auditors and diligence teams.
Bottom line
Risk scores inform who sells. Nothing scores whether their transfer came back after the refund. If your problem lives in digital trust & safety, Sift deserves its reputation. If your problem is a platform balance lower than your ledger predicts — refunds succeeding while transfers never come home — that problem has exactly one purpose-built answer, and you are reading it. Run the free audit; the number settles the debate faster than any comparison page can.
Common questions
Sift for marketplace fund hygiene?
Different layer — trust scoring versus movement auditing; both appear in mature stacks.
Is FeeGuard a better choice than Sift?
For digital trust & safety, Sift is the specialist and we say so plainly. For detecting and recovering silent Stripe Connect losses — the four vectors above — FeeGuard is purpose-built and Sift does not perform that function. Most platforms comparing the two are feeling the second problem.
Can we run Sift and FeeGuard together?
Yes, commonly. They operate on different objects and different events; neither conflicts with the other’s workflow.
What does switching cost us?
Nothing upfront: read-only key, ten-minute setup, free detection. Recovery carries a success fee only on confirmed dollars — so trying FeeGuard risks no budget at all.