Duty drawback has been on the books since 1789. For most of that time, recovering it meant hiring a specialty firm that charged 20–30% of your refund and only took the largest accounts. We're turning that work into software.
The US refunds 99% of the duties, taxes, and feeson imported goods that are later exported or destroyed. It's not a loophole — it's 19 USC § 1313, written so American producers and re-exporters aren't taxed on goods that never get consumed here.
The problem was never the law. It was the math. Matching years of imports to years of exports across the five drawback types, respecting the five-year clock, the 8-digit HTS rule, the "lesser of" cap, and a moving target of § 301, § 232, and IEEPA exclusions — that's thousands of hours of analyst work. So the firms that do it charge a fortune, and they reserve their attention for the accounts where a fortune is worth chasing.
The result: an estimated $2–4 billion in eligible drawback goes unclaimed every year, most of it owed to companies that were never profitable enough for a specialist to call back.
We built DrawbackAI to do that matching in minutes instead of months, to show its work on every line, and to charge a flat price instead of a slice of your refund. The number we give you isn't a sales pitch — it's a defensible estimate with the statute cited next to it, and every excluded duty named out loud.
Every dollar in an estimate links to the line it came from, the "lesser of" calc, the 99% factor, and the statute behind it. A number you can't audit is a number you can't defend at liquidation.
AD/CVD, IEEPA reciprocal tariffs, out-of-window imports — itemized, never silently dropped. The honest total is the one that survives a CBP review.
We never take a percentage of your refund. The incentive that breaks the specialty model — bigger refund, bigger fee — has no place in software. You keep what you recover.
Final refund is determined by CBP. We show a confidence level on every match and a low–high range on every total. We are not your lawyer, and we won't pretend a model outranks a liquidation.
Fifteen years in trade compliance and customs brokerage. Filed drawback claims by hand before deciding the work should be a product, not a service.
Built data-matching systems at scale for logistics and fintech. Now turning the five drawback types into code that shows its work.
DrawbackAI is built and backed by Stable Software, a studio focused on software for international trade. That gives us a head start most standalone startups don't have: working relationships with customs brokerages, a library of real (anonymized) entry data to test against, and people who've sat on both sides of a CBP liquidation.
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