How Hookdeck Became the Event Gateway for Reliable Webhook Delivery

There is a meaningful difference between "we try hard" and "we guarantee at-least-once."

Most webhook tools do the former. Your provider sends the event. Your server processes it. Something in between drops it, and your provider either retries or it doesn't, on a schedule it controls, with no external visibility. If something goes wrong, you reconstruct what happened from whatever logs survived.

Hookdeck did something most tools are afraid to do: they wrote down their delivery guarantee. At-least-once delivery is documented as a contract — not a blog post, not a sales claim, but an architectural commitment that shapes how they built everything else. Read G2 reviews of Hookdeck to see how real teams describe this in practice. That distinction sounds subtle. In practice, it changes the systems you can design, the SLAs you can promise, and the postmortems you have to write.

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What Hookdeck Actually Gives You

At-least-once means Hookdeck accepts your webhook event at ingress, stores it durably, and commits to delivering it to your destination — even if your server is down, slow, or returning errors. Hookdeck will retry up to 50 times using an exponential backoff schedule. Fifty retries is not a typo — that is more retry depth than the vast majority of engineering teams build into their own infrastructure. See the Hookdeck official documentation for full configuration details.

The event routing and filtering layer is genuinely impressive. You can configure Hookdeck to route events from the same source to different destinations based on payload content — route Stripe payment_intent.succeeded to your orders service and customer.subscription.deleted to your churn workflow, from a single inbound endpoint. The filtering happens before the delivery attempt, which means you only retry the deliveries that actually matter to a given consumer.

The SOC 2 compliance certification deserves a sentence of real respect. SOC 2 is not a checkbox you get in a weekend. It is an audit of your processes, your infrastructure controls, your access management, your incident response. When Hookdeck says they're SOC 2 compliant, that is a statement that an external auditor reviewed how they handle your webhook payloads. For teams selling to enterprise buyers who ask about security posture — that certification removes a conversation that would otherwise take weeks.

The Vercel middleware integration is a practical quality-of-life detail that matters more than it sounds. One import, a few lines of config, and your Next.js API routes are proxied through Hookdeck's gateway automatically. No new infrastructure to deploy. The production path just gains a durable queue in front of it.

At $39/month for the Team plan, Hookdeck is not expensive for what it provides. That is "line item on the team's credit card" territory, not "requires a procurement conversation."

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How ngrok Fits Into This Picture

ngrok is the developer tool that made local webhook testing joyful — but it provides no production delivery guarantee. See ngrok documentation for its current feature set. Before ngrok, getting a Stripe webhook to your localhost involved a depressing sequence of tunnels, port forwarding, and prayer. ngrok made it a thirty-second setup, and for that the industry owes it genuine gratitude.

ngrok's Traffic Inspector is excellent. You can see every request that came through the tunnel — headers, body, query parameters — and replay any of them against your local server with one click. The UX is clean. The local agent is stable. The product does exactly what it promises.

But ngrok does not promise anything about production delivery. It is a tunnel and an inspector. That is not a criticism; it is a description of scope. When you're using ngrok in production (which some teams do, and some ngrok plans support), you are exposing a port and inspecting traffic — not operating an event queue with delivery guarantees. If your server is unreachable when a webhook arrives, ngrok is not buffering that event and retrying it.

These are apples and oranges. ngrok solves local development. Hookdeck solves production delivery reliability. They are complementary — you can use ngrok while writing your handler, deploy it, and have Hookdeck in front of it in production.

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Where HookTunnel Sits

HookTunnel is honest about what it does not do. The terms say it explicitly: no delivery guarantee. HookTunnel is not a queue. It is not a retry engine. It captures every inbound HTTP request to your hook URL — full headers, full body, the timestamp, the source IP — and keeps it for you, indexed and searchable.

That is a different job. And in the right context, it is the more important job.

Here is the scenario: Hookdeck's 50 auto-retries have not fired yet. A webhook arrived six hours ago during an incident. It was captured, logged, possibly processed — but the outcome is unclear. You need to see the exact payload from that request: the headers, the body, the X-Stripe-Signature, the raw bytes. You need to know whether it arrived malformed or arrived clean. You may need to replay it — not to a fixed internal endpoint, but to your current production URL, or to a staging environment, or to localhost so you can step through the handler with a debugger.

That is the forensics layer. That is what HookTunnel provides.

HookTunnel Pro at $19/month gives you full request history plus replay to any target URL. You specify the destination; HookTunnel sends the original captured payload. Hookdeck's replay is to a configured destination — useful, but different from "replay to this ad-hoc URL I'm testing right now."

The math: $19 for payload history and forensic replay versus $39 for a delivery guarantee and automated retry pipeline. These tools are not competing for the same job. A team running Hookdeck in production might also want HookTunnel for the incidents that slip through — the single malformed event that arrived before the retry logic kicked in, the one you need to inspect by hand.

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A Decision Framework

High-volume production event routing with a delivery contract: Hookdeck. The at-least-once guarantee, the 50-retry depth, the event routing and filtering, and the SOC 2 certification make it the right answer when your business logic runs on webhook events and "I don't know if it was delivered" is not an acceptable answer.

Local development and traffic inspection: ngrok. The Traffic Inspector is excellent, the setup is thirty seconds, and the replay-to-localhost button saves real time during development. Nothing else is as frictionless for this specific use case.

Payload forensics, incident replay, and captured history: HookTunnel. When you need to answer "exactly what was in that payload" — across providers, across incidents, without rebuilding from scattered logs — HookTunnel gives you the searchable history and the Pro replay to any URL. No credits, no delivery queue, no complexity. See HookTunnel features and pricing for details. For Stripe-specific recovery flows, the guide on webhook revenue leakage shows how replay prevents lost revenue.

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The Honest Conclusion

Hookdeck is one of the most thoughtfully engineered tools in this space. The decision to write down "at-least-once delivery" as an explicit architectural contract rather than a marketing aspiration reflects the kind of engineering culture that builds systems you can actually rely on. The 50-retry depth is generous. The event routing layer is something most teams would spend months building themselves. The SOC 2 cert is real work, not theater.

If automated retries and documented delivery guarantees are your need, it is hard to argue against Hookdeck at $39/month.

But if your need starts with "show me exactly what arrived, and let me replay it wherever I want" — the question is different, and a new player just arrived.