Guide · 5 min read
Shadow mode: what you actually learn from 90 days of replay
Connecting Stripe read-only and replaying your last 90 days of activity against a proposed policy is the cheapest way to find out what your refund policy is actually doing. Walkthrough of what the report tells you.
Shadow mode is the read-only simulation Axiru runs against your last 90 days of Stripe history. You connect Stripe with read-only credentials, sketch out a refund policy in plain language, and the system replays every refund, credit, and payout from the last 90 days against that policy. No enforcement, no risk, no card required.
Three things almost always come back from the first report. Here is what to expect.
Finding 1: the long tail of goodwill credit
Most teams discover they are issuing more goodwill credit than they thought, concentrated in a few CS reps or a single AI agent. The dollar amounts are small individually and material in aggregate. Shadow mode quantifies it and shows you which identities and reason codes are driving it.
Finding 2: duplicate or near-duplicate refunds
Customers asking twice, agents not seeing the prior refund, and integrations that retry without idempotency. Shadow mode catches these by replaying refund history against a lifetime-customer rule (no more than N refunds per customer per 30 days) and shows you the misses.
Finding 3: payouts and transfers nobody is governing
The biggest surprise on platform/marketplace accounts is usually the payout side. Refunds get attention; payouts and Connect transfers often go out under whatever default rules were set up at integration time and have not been reviewed since. Shadow mode surfaces the volume and the leakage on that surface alongside refunds.
What you do with the report
Tune the policy. The first draft is rarely the policy that goes live. Shadow mode is unlimited; replay as many policy versions as the team needs to align before turning enforcement on. When the simulation matches what the team would have done by hand, you are ready for live enforcement.
Most teams take 2-4 weeks from first replay to live enforcement on the first tier (usually refunds above a dollar threshold). Subsequent tiers (credits, payouts, transfers) follow one at a time, on the same shadow-then-live cycle.