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Vendor Evaluation·9 min read

The Webhook Vendor Evaluation Checklist Nobody Published Until Teams Started Paying for Surprises

Every team learns the same lessons about webhook vendor evaluation the expensive way. This checklist compiles the signals from public reviews, GitHub trackers, and pricing pages so you don't have to.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read

Support Response Time as a Reliability Proxy: What Review Patterns Reveal Before You Sign a Contract

You don't discover support quality when you're evaluating a tool. You discover it at 2am during an incident. Here's how to use public review patterns to evaluate support before you're in that situation.

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Vendor Evaluation·8 min read

When Developer Tools Become Platforms: The Complexity Trap Reviewers Spotted Across Webhook Infrastructure

The best webhook tools started as simple solutions to clear problems. As they grew into platforms, a consistent reviewer pattern emerged: complexity outpacing the actual job to be done.

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Vendor Evaluation·8 min read

SQS DLQ 14-Day Retention Cap: What Happens When You're On Vacation During a Webhook Incident

SQS is excellent queue infrastructure. But when a webhook incident happens while you're unavailable, the 14-day retention clock on dead-letter queues runs whether you're watching or not.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read

How a Single Misconfigured Webhook Automation Burns Pipedream Credits Over a Weekend

Pipedream's workflow automation is genuinely capable. The reviewers who surfaced credit burn aren't describing a broken product — they're describing the economics of metered compute when something loops.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read

Hookdeck's 50-Retry Hard Cap: What It Means for Outage Recovery Tolerance

Hookdeck's retry engine is one of its strongest features. The 50-attempt cap documented in their own docs isn't a complaint — it's a structural constraint worth understanding before a long outage.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read

Svix $490/Month: When Webhooks-as-a-Service Is Priced for Platforms, Not Indie Teams

Svix solves a real problem — outbound webhooks at scale for platform companies. The price and feature set are calibrated for that buyer. Here's how to know if that buyer is you.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read

ngrok Is Genuinely Great Tunneling Tech — So Why Do Reviewers Keep Mentioning 7–10 Day Support Waits?

ngrok solved the local webhook testing problem. The reviewers who surface billing friction aren't complaining about the tunneling — they're describing what happens next.

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Engineering·6 min read

The Webhook Debugging Checklist: What to Check When Events Go Missing

Your logs show 200 OK. Stripe says delivered. The database has nothing. Here is the ordered checklist to find which layer dropped the event — and how outcome receipts tell you exactly where things went wrong.

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Engineering·6 min read

The Silent Webhook Failure: When Your Handler Returns 200 But Nothing Happens

Zero errors. Normal latency. Error rate 0%. And 6 out of 20 customers who upgraded to Pro can't access Pro features. Your webhook handler returned 200 for all 20 events. This is a silent webhook failure — and it's the hardest kind to debug.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2026-02-26

How AWS EventBridge Makes Cloud-Native Event Routing Scalable

Getting a Stripe webhook into your AWS microservices stack used to require custom Lambda glue code for every integration. EventBridge changed that.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2026-02-19

How AWS SQS's At-Least-Once Delivery Model Changes Webhook Reliability

SQS isn't glamorous. It's been around since 2006. And it's still the most battle-tested at-least-once message delivery system on the planet. When webhooks must not be lost, this is what serious teams reach for.

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Engineering·5 min read·2026-02-16

Debugging Twilio Voice Webhooks: A Step-by-Step Guide

Marcus has an IVR that intermittently routes calls to the wrong queue. He knows a Twilio webhook is involved. He's looking at 400 events from 80 different calls, all interleaved. This is the debugging workflow that gets from symptom to root cause in under 20 minutes.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2026-02-06

How Hookdeck's At-Least-Once Guarantee Changes How You Build Integrations

An at-least-once delivery guarantee doesn't mean perfect delivery. It means duplicates are real and idempotency isn't optional. Hookdeck teaches you that the hard way — and it's a better developer.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2026-01-30

How Hookdeck Became the Event Gateway for Reliable Webhook Delivery

Most webhook tools claim reliability. Hookdeck documents it. That distinction changes everything about how you build.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2026-01-23

Hookdeck Free Plan: What's Included, Where the Limits Are, and a Permanent Free Option

Hookdeck's free plan is a reasonable starting point for webhook delivery management. Before you build your first connection, here's what changes when you scale — and the sunk cost of learning any event gateway.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2026-01-14

Multi-Org Webhook Workflows: Why Agency Teams Keep Asking Hookdeck for Better Client Switching

Hookdeck's single-org experience is polished. The reviewers asking for multi-org improvements aren't dissatisfied — they're describing where the product's scope ends.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2026-01-10

How Hookdeck's Observability Dashboard Cuts Webhook Incident Response Time

Webhook incidents are invisible by default. Hookdeck fixed that with a delivery dashboard that makes the invisible visible. But not every team needs a gateway.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2026-01-04

When Webhook Infrastructure Becomes Another Platform to Learn: The Hookdeck Onboarding Pattern

Hookdeck's power is real. The G2 reviewers noting onboarding complexity aren't complaining about broken software — they're describing the cost of a capable platform's surface area.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2026-01-01

Hookdeck Throughput Pricing: What G2 Reviewers Said About Budget Anxiety Beyond the Free Tier

Hookdeck's delivery reliability is well-regarded. The reviewers who flag pricing aren't unhappy with the product — they're describing where the cost model creates friction.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-12-27

Truncated Error Messages in Webhook Gateways: A Signal Worth Checking Before You Commit

Webhook debugging lives or dies by error message completeness. A G2 reviewer noted truncated error messages in Hookdeck event delivery. Here's why that signal matters and how to evaluate it.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2025-12-21

How Kafka's Exactly-Once Semantics Transformed Event Processing Reliability

Exactly-once delivery is the most abused phrase in distributed systems. Kafka Streams' implementation is one of the honest ones. Here's what it actually does — and what it doesn't.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2025-12-18

How Kafka Enables Ordered Event Streaming for Webhook-Driven Systems

Kafka changed the architecture of the internet. The insight — treat events as an append-only log, not messages to be consumed and deleted — turned out to be one of the most durable ideas in distributed systems.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-12-07

ngrok Custom Domains Are Powerful — Reviewers Say the Routing Config Is Where Teams Get Stuck

ngrok custom domains move webhooks from local dev into production-adjacent territory. The complexity reviewers flagged isn't a bug — it's a capability surface that requires configuration investment.

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Comparisons·7 min read·2025-12-01

How ngrok Custom Domains Make Webhooks Production-Ready

Changing your webhook URL every time your tunnel restarts is the fastest way to break your Stripe integration. ngrok custom domains fix this. So does something cheaper.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-11-26

When Basic Features Require Upgrading: ngrok's Tier Confusion and What to Do Instead

ngrok's pricing tiers gate features that some developers expect to be basic. Reviewers have flagged the distribution as unclear. Here's a factual breakdown and how to think about it.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-11-20

ngrok Free Tier: What 'Limited Bandwidth and Ugly URLs' Means for Your Webhook Testing Setup

ngrok's free tier opened local webhook testing for millions of developers. The reviewer pattern around bandwidth limits and randomly-generated URLs isn't a complaint about reliability — it's about workflow friction as projects mature.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-11-12

ngrok Free Trial: What You Get, What You Don't, and a Free Alternative With No Timer

ngrok's free tier is genuinely useful for local webhook development. Before you upgrade to a paid plan, here's what changes — and why the intellectual investment in any platform is worth naming before you make it.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-11-09

Pay-Per-Month or Billed Per Year? The ngrok Billing Ambiguity Reviewers Keep Flagging

ngrok is priced for developers, but some reviewers have described a gap between how the pricing is advertised and how it is billed. Here's the pattern and what it signals.

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Comparisons·7 min read·2025-11-01

How ngrok's Traffic Inspector Kills the Guesswork in Webhook Debugging

Webhook debugging used to mean adding console.log everywhere and hoping. ngrok's Traffic Inspector made that feel barbaric.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-10-25

How ngrok Makes Local Webhook Testing Safe and Instant

ngrok killed the 'expose localhost' problem for a generation of developers. But when does local tunnel genius become a production gap?

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-10-20

Pipedream Trial Charges: What Public Reviewers Reported About Renewal and Refund Workflows

Pipedream's automation platform is widely used. Some public reviewers have described unexpected charges and support friction around trial transitions. Here's the pattern and how to protect yourself.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-10-06

Pipedream Free Plan and Credits: What to Know Before You Build Your First Webhook Workflow

Pipedream's free plan is generous for getting started with workflow automation. Before you wire up your first webhook trigger, understand the credit model — and why intellectual investment in any platform has a hidden cost.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-10-01

Pipedream's 'Projects' Interface: What Reviewers Said About Navigation Getting Harder After the Redesign

Pipedream's redesign introduced the 'Projects' organization concept. G2 reviewers noted the navigation became harder to manage. Here's the signal and how to evaluate it.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-09-27

When a Reviewer Describes 'Terrible Sales': Pipedream Support Patterns Worth Knowing

Support quality is a proxy for vendor reliability. One Trustpilot reviewer described a sales interaction as 'terrible' and a community post flagged slow response during a billing incident. Here's the signal.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2025-09-23

Workflow Platform vs. Webhook Evidence Layer: Why Pipedream's Credit Model Changes Your Incident Math

Pipedream is the right tool for webhook-triggered workflows. It's a different fit for pure webhook evidence and replay. Here's how the credit model changes the decision math.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2025-09-15

How RabbitMQ's Acknowledgement Model Guarantees At-Least-Once Delivery

The message stays in the queue until you acknowledge it. That one design decision makes RabbitMQ one of the most reliable message brokers ever built. Here's how it shapes webhook architectures.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-09-08

How RabbitMQ Dead-Letter Exchanges Handle Webhook Poison Messages

A poison message is a webhook your handler keeps rejecting. Every queue needs a quarantine. RabbitMQ's dead-letter exchange is the cleanest design for it.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2025-08-18

The SQS DLQ Redrive Ritual: Operational Overhead Hidden in 'Serverless' Webhook Architecture

SQS dead-letter queues give you error isolation. The redrive workflow — investigate → fix → redrive → verify — is a manual ritual that adds operational overhead to every webhook incident.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-08-08

How SQS FIFO Enables Exactly-Once Webhook Processing

Exactly-once delivery is the holy grail of distributed systems. Most systems lie about having it. SQS FIFO is honest about what it actually provides. That honesty is rare and valuable.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2025-08-03

Why Every Team Building Webhooks on SQS Reinvents Idempotency — and What the Alternatives Look Like

AWS docs say it plainly: design your SQS application to be idempotent. What they don't say is how many teams discover this requirement after their first duplicate charge or double-processed order.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2025-07-28

SQS Standard vs. FIFO: The Ordering and Deduplication Complexity Tax Teams Discover Too Late

SQS Standard offers scale; FIFO offers ordering and deduplication. What teams discover too late is that each choice adds its own complexity overhead for webhook processing.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-07-20

Stripe Webhook Duplicate Events: Why It Happens and How to Handle It

Stripe retries webhooks on any 5xx or timeout. When your handler is slow under load, the retry arrives before the first run finishes. Application-level idempotency checks are not enough. Here is the full pattern — including the race condition most implementations miss.

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Webhook Guides·8 min read·2025-07-13

How to Stop Stripe Webhooks From Creating Duplicate Orders

Stripe's retry policy is designed to ensure delivery. Without idempotency in your handler, it also ensures duplicate orders. Here's the fix.

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Comparisons·7 min read·2025-06-28

Svix Free Trial: What the Professional Plan Looks Like — and What to Try First

Svix is the market leader for sending webhooks to customers. Before you sign up, understand what you're buying — and whether your use case is sending or receiving. The answer changes everything.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-06-18

How Svix's Retry Schedule Handles Webhook Delivery Failures at Scale

Retries are where most webhook systems quietly fail. Svix's retry schedule was designed for the real world: customer servers down, rate-limited, flaky.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-06-13

Svix SDK Health: What the Public GitHub Issues Tracker Shows About Kotlin and Datetime Edge Cases

Open-source SDK issues are normal software development signals — not product verdicts. Here's what the Svix GitHub tracker shows about recent Kotlin and datetime edge cases.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-06-08

Svix Delivers Reliably — Here's What Reviewers Said About Telemetry Depth When Debugging

Reliable delivery and deep observability are different capabilities. Svix's delivery is well-regarded; the telemetry feedback from one G2 reviewer points to a distinction worth understanding.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-06-04

Svix's Portal Is Powerful — G2 Reviewers Note the Gap Between Customization Expectations and Reality

Svix offers a branded customer portal for webhook management. The G2 reviewers noting UI customization gaps aren't describing broken software — they're describing where self-service ends and custom development begins.

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Vendor Evaluation·7 min read·2025-05-30

Putting Your Customer-Facing Webhook Portal in an External Vendor's Hands: Questions Worth Asking

Embedding Svix's customer portal in your product means your users' webhook experience depends on Svix's uptime and UI decisions. One reviewer flagged this. Here's how to think about it.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-05-26

How Svix Turned Webhook Sending into a Service

Delivering webhooks reliably to thousands of customer endpoints is a product in itself. Svix understood that before almost anyone else did.

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Comparisons·9 min read·2025-05-21

How Temporal Makes Webhook Workflows Durable and Automatically Retried

Temporal is one of the most impressive pieces of infrastructure built in the last decade. For webhook processing, it means your handlers survive crashes, retries, and arbitrary delays — automatically.

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Comparisons·8 min read·2025-05-14

How Temporal's Retry Defaults Protect Your Webhook Handlers from Transient Failures

Most retry defaults are too conservative. Temporal's default is unlimited retries with exponential backoff. Configuring it *down* from unlimited is the deliberate choice. That's a different design philosophy.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-05-09

How to Test Stripe Webhooks Locally: Beyond ngrok

Stripe CLI sends synthetic events. ngrok gives you a real URL that changes every session. HookTunnel gives you a permanent URL that captures events even when your tunnel is offline and lets you replay them when you reconnect.

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Webhook Guides·12 min read·2025-04-29

The Complete Guide to Debugging Webhooks in 2026

A practical, end-to-end guide to debugging webhooks — from capturing your first payload to verifying your handler actually committed the side-effect.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-04-24

Building a Webhook-Driven Architecture That Survives Real Failures

Most webhook integrations are built in an afternoon. They work fine for the first 500 customers. Then you hit a DB connection storm, a provider sending 10x volume, or a deploy during peak hours — and the architecture that worked fine becomes a 3 AM incident.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-04-14

Why Your Webhook Handler Should Never Do Heavy Work Synchronously

Your webhook handler has 15-30 seconds before the provider gives up and retries. When it retries, your handler runs again — double provisioning, double emails, double charges. Here is the correct async pattern, and why returning 200 still does not tell you the job finished.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-04-07

From "Something Broke" to "Here's the Evidence": Running a Webhook Incident

A Slack message: 'We're getting reports from enterprise customers that their integrations aren't working.' The incident is already 40 minutes old. You have no investigation, no timeline, no context. What follows determines whether this is a 90-minute incident or a 6-hour one.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-03-31

Webhook Outage Recovery Playbook: Replay Without Making Things Worse

2 hours and 37 minutes of failed webhook deliveries. Some may have been retried and partially processed. You don't know which ones. Replay everything and risk duplicates. Replay nothing and have revenue gaps. Or follow this playbook.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-03-27

Webhook Retry Storms: How Broken Targets Make Outages Worse

A 20-minute DB migration becomes a 4-hour outage because Stripe, Twilio, and GitHub all pile on retries at once. The circuit breaker pattern stops this from happening — here's how it works at the ingress layer.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-03-20

Webhook Revenue Leakage: The Silent Cost Your P&L Doesn't Show

There is a category of churn you have never measured: customers who paid, did not receive what they paid for, and left without saying anything. Their exit survey says 'product wasn't the right fit.' What they didn't tell you: their webhook never applied.

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Engineering·5 min read·2025-03-16

Webhook Signature Verification: Why It's Not Optional (And How to Do It Right)

Someone finds your webhook endpoint URL. They POST a fake payment_intent.succeeded event. Your handler provisions Pro access without a payment. Signature verification prevents this — but only if you implement it correctly. The raw body requirement trips up most implementations.

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Comparisons·7 min read·2025-02-22

webhooks.io Free Trial: What the Developer Plan Includes and a No-Trial Alternative

webhooks.io reduces webhook proxy build time. Before you invest in learning the platform, understand what the Developer plan includes — and the evaluation challenge of a tool with very limited public reviews.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-02-16

When Webhook Infrastructure Slows Down, Ops Fail: One Pattern Reviewers Surfaced From webhooks.io

Performance degradation in webhook infrastructure doesn't just slow you down — one reviewer described operations failing when the platform slowed. Here's how to evaluate this pattern in any tool.

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Comparisons·7 min read·2025-02-09

How webhooks.io Uses Configurable Retry Policies to Ensure Delivery

Most webhook tools have retries. Almost none let you choose how those retries work. webhooks.io does. That's a more important distinction than it sounds.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-02-01

webhooks.io Has 2 G2 Reviews — What Low Social Proof Means When Evaluating Webhook Reliability

The webhook market has tools with hundreds of reviews and tools with two. Here's a framework for evaluating reliability when the social proof is thin — using webhooks.io as a case study.

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Vendor Evaluation·6 min read·2025-01-24

Security Posture as a Reviewer Signal: What One webhooks.io Evaluation Raised

One G2 reviewer described webhooks.io's security as on the 'lower side.' With only 2 total reviews, this is a low-confidence signal — but it raises important evaluation questions for any webhook tool.

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Webhook Guides·7 min read·2025-01-19

Why 'Delivered' Doesn't Mean Your Webhook Actually Worked

HTTP 200 from your webhook handler doesn't mean your app actually did the thing. Here's the gap that silently breaks payment flows — and how to fix it.

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