---
title: Refunds
description: "How money goes back: outbound refunds through codespar_pay, provider-level refund tools such as Pix devolution, and the commerce.payment.refunded trigger event that tells your backend it happened."
---

# Refunds

A refund is an **outbound** money movement, so it rides the outbound half of the platform. Three pieces are involved, and you will usually touch all three.

## 1. Moving the money back

- **`codespar_pay`** is the outbound meta-tool: payouts, supplier disbursements, and refunds. Where `codespar_charge` requests money in, `codespar_pay` sends it out to a recipient, including back to a buyer. See [Charge vs Pay](/docs/concepts/meta-tools/pay).
- **Provider refund tools.** Connections also expose their provider's native refund surface through the [tool router](/docs/concepts/tool-router), tied to the original transaction rather than a free-form transfer, for example a Pix devolution on a Pix connection, or a card refund on a card processor's server. When you need "refund THIS payment" semantics (partial amounts, linkage to the original end-to-end id), prefer the provider tool on the same connection that took the charge.

Which of the two applies depends on the rail and the provider connection in your project; the provider tool list for each connection is discoverable in the catalog and via `codespar_discover`.

## 2. Knowing it settled

Subscribe a [trigger](/docs/concepts/triggers) to **`commerce.payment.refunded`**: it fires when the provider processes the refund, with the refunded amount in the payload (on Stripe, `amount_minor` carries it). `commerce.payment.disputed` is the neighboring event for chargebacks, which are a different animal: a dispute is opened against you, not initiated by you.

## 3. What it costs

A refund that reaches a terminal state counts as one settled transaction under [Orchestration billing](/docs/concepts/billing), the same $0.10 as the charge it reverses. Movements that never settle are free.

## Honest edges

- Refund coverage follows the provider connection: not every provider exposes partial refunds, and Pix devolution windows are set by the rail, not by CodeSpar.
- There is no single cross-provider "refund this charge" meta-tool today; the pattern above (provider tool for linked refunds, `codespar_pay` for free-form returns) is the supported path.