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

Hookdeck built something that genuinely needed building. Before tools like Hookdeck, teams that needed reliable webhook delivery had two options: build retry logic themselves (time-consuming, error-prone, never quite complete) or accept that some percentage of webhook deliveries would fail silently and invisibly — a problem covered in our silent webhook failure guide. Hookdeck made at-least-once delivery a managed infrastructure concern rather than an application-code concern, and that's a real contribution to how webhook-driven systems can be built. Read Hookdeck G2 reviews for real-user perspectives on the free plan limits.

This post is an honest look at what the Hookdeck free plan includes, where throughput pricing begins, what the platform's mental model requires you to learn, and whether a simpler tool would better match your current problem.

What Hookdeck's Free Plan Includes

Hookdeck's free plan gives you access to the core event gateway model — sources, connections, destinations, retry, and an observability dashboard. See the Hookdeck documentation for current free tier limits.

Sources. A source is a Hookdeck-managed URL that receives inbound webhook events from your providers. You point Stripe, Twilio, GitHub, or any other provider at a Hookdeck source URL rather than at your own server. Hookdeck receives the event, stores it, and manages delivery from there.

Connections and destinations. A connection links a source to a destination. A destination is where Hookdeck actually sends the event — typically your application server. You can add filters, transformations, and retry policies to a connection. This is the routing layer that makes Hookdeck more than a simple proxy.

Retry and delivery management. Hookdeck will retry failed deliveries on a configurable schedule. If your server returns a 5xx, Hookdeck retries with backoff. Events aren't lost if your server is temporarily unavailable. This is the core capability the platform is built around.

Observability dashboard. A visual event log showing what arrived, what was delivered, what failed, and the full request and response payload for each attempt. For debugging delivery failures, this is useful.

Free plan limits apply to request volume, the number of connections, and retention window. The specific limits change — check the current pricing page rather than relying on any post's numbers — but the free tier is designed to support low-volume integrations and development workflows rather than production-scale traffic.

What Changes on Paid Plans

The paid plans are structured around the things that matter at scale:

Higher throughput. The free tier caps the number of events you can receive per month. Paid plans raise this ceiling substantially. At production traffic volumes — a busy Stripe integration, a high-volume webhook producer — the free tier ceiling is often the first constraint you encounter.

Longer event retention. Hookdeck stores events for a retention window that varies by plan. Longer retention means you can investigate incidents that happened days or weeks ago rather than only recent events. For forensic debugging after an incident, retention window is often the deciding factor.

More connections. At scale, you likely have multiple webhook producers and multiple destination servers. Paid plans support more connections, which means more source-to-destination routing paths.

Team features. Multiple team members, role-based access, and audit logging are paid capabilities. Hookdeck's free plan is effectively single-user in practice.

Priority support. Free plan support is community-based. Paid plans include direct support channels.

The Throughput Pricing Model: What It Means in Practice

Hookdeck's pricing is usage-based above the free tier — you pay per event or per batch of events delivered beyond the included volume. This is a common model in the event infrastructure space, and it aligns Hookdeck's revenue with your usage rather than charging a flat fee regardless of scale.

The practical implication: your monthly cost is a function of your webhook volume. Low-volume integrations stay within or near the free tier. High-volume integrations — a payment processor that fires events for every transaction, a real-time data feed, a platform sending events to thousands of customers — can push costs higher than a flat-fee tool would.

G2 reviewers, as recently as January 2026, have described Hookdeck's throughput pricing as feeling steep at scale. That's not a verdict — individual cost tolerance varies, and what feels steep for one team's budget may be acceptable for another's. But it's worth reading those reviews, estimating your monthly event volume, and doing the arithmetic on the pricing calculator before committing. Usage-based pricing can surprise you if you haven't modeled your volume accurately.

The Hookdeck Mental Model

Hookdeck is an event gateway, and event gateways have their own way of thinking about the problem. The concepts you need to internalize before you can use Hookdeck effectively include:

Sources, connections, destinations. The three-part routing model is central. Every event flows from a source through a connection to a destination. You configure each independently. If your mental model of the problem is "Stripe sends an event to my server," Hookdeck asks you to re-frame it as "Stripe sends an event to a source, which routes it through a connection with a retry policy to a destination which is your server."

Filters and transformations. Connections support content-based routing — you can filter which events flow to which destinations based on payload content, headers, or event type. Transformations let you modify the payload in transit. These are powerful features, but they require understanding Hookdeck's expression language and filter syntax.

Retry policies. Hookdeck's retry configuration has its own options: schedule type, backoff algorithm, max attempts, alert conditions. Getting this right means understanding what each option does and how it interacts with your server's behavior.

Rate limiting. Hookdeck can throttle delivery to your destination server — useful if your server can't handle the full burst rate of incoming events. Configuring this correctly requires understanding both Hookdeck's rate limit model and your own server's capacity.

This is not a complaint about Hookdeck's design. These are deliberate, well-considered capabilities for teams that need them. But the mental model is a real investment, and it's worth naming before you start building connections.

The Hidden Cost of Free Trials: Intellectual Investment

Time spent learning a platform's concepts is time you can't un-spend — and that creates psychological pressure to stay even when a simpler tool fits better. See the webhook vendor evaluation checklist to assess fit before committing.

Hookdeck's gateway model — sources connecting to destinations through connections that carry filters, transformations, and retry policies — is an expressive system. Building fluency with it takes hours, not minutes. Once you've built a few connections, configured retry policies, and set up your filter expressions, you've made an investment. Switching to a different tool means abandoning that investment. The sunk cost of the learning curve makes staying feel economically rational even when the tool is more than your use case requires.

The antidote is to start from the use case rather than the tool. What do you actually need today? If you need at-least-once delivery guarantees and automatic retry orchestration — the core promise of an event gateway — Hookdeck is worth the investment. If what you need is a place to capture incoming webhooks, inspect their contents, and occasionally replay one to a different URL, the gateway model may be more than you need. Starting with the simpler tool, validating the use case, and upgrading deliberately when you outgrow it is almost always the better sequence.

HookTunnel is built for the simpler case: a permanent URL that captures every request, stores it, and lets you replay it manually. No sources, no connections, no destinations, no filter syntax to learn. If you don't need automatic retry orchestration, you don't need to build a mental model of event gateways. You've invested nothing if the tool turns out not to match your needs.

How HookTunnel Compares

Hookdeck and HookTunnel solve different problems, and the comparison is only useful if you're clear about which problem you have.

Hookdeck is the right tool if you need guaranteed delivery with automatic retry, content-based routing to multiple destinations, or payload transformation in transit. If your application's correctness depends on webhooks being delivered reliably even when your server is temporarily unavailable, Hookdeck's gateway model addresses that requirement directly.

HookTunnel is the right tool if you need a permanent URL that captures everything a provider sends, stores the full payload, and lets you replay requests manually when debugging. It's a webhook evidence layer — inspection and replay, not routing and delivery guarantee.

The HookTunnel free tier gives you one permanent webhook URL with no account, no credit card, and no time limit. Your provider points at it once and it captures indefinitely. Free tier stores 24 hours of history. HookTunnel Pro is $19 per month flat — no throughput billing, no per-event charges, no usage-based cost that scales with volume. You get 30 days of history and one-click replay to any endpoint.

There is no throughput pricing. Your monthly cost is $19 regardless of whether you receive ten events or ten thousand.

Which Tool Matches Your Use Case

Hookdeck is the right tool if you need event gateway semantics — at-least-once delivery, retry orchestration, and content-based routing. That's a real and important problem, and Hookdeck solves it well.

If your problem is more modest — you want to see what webhook payloads your providers are actually sending, hold onto that history for debugging, and occasionally replay an event to a different URL — the gateway model carries more complexity than the problem requires.

Know which problem is yours before you start building connections. The Hookdeck free plan is a reasonable starting point, and for teams that need the gateway model, the upgrade path is clear. For teams that only need the evidence layer, starting simpler costs nothing and keeps your options open.

Generate a free permanent webhook URL → No account. No credit card. No event gateway to configure.