How Svix Turned Webhook Sending into a Service

You've shipped the feature. Your SaaS platform can trigger events — a payment cleared, a form was submitted, a job completed — and you want to let customers hook into those events with webhooks. Simple enough.

Then a customer's server goes down for a deployment. Another customer's endpoint starts returning 500s because they pushed a bad handler. A third customer's server is rate-limiting your delivery attempts. Now you have to decide: do you keep retrying? For how long? With what backoff curve? What do you tell customers when their delivery fails? Can they see the failure? Can they trigger a resend without calling your support team?

This is where most teams discover they've accidentally agreed to build a reliability layer on top of their event system. The retry queue fills up. Customer support tickets arrive: "Did my webhook fire? I don't see it." Your engineering team builds a basic admin panel. Then a better one. Then they rewrite the queue to handle scale.

Svix understood this problem before most teams encountered it. They built the entire managed layer around it and turned "send webhooks reliably to your customers" into a product.

What Svix does brilliantly

The core value of Svix is not the retry logic itself — it is the full operational stack that sits around webhook delivery: customer portal, delivery logs, 90-day retention, and 11-attempt retry engineering. The Svix documentation covers all of this in detail, and G2 reviews of Svix surface where the product shines and where gaps remain.

The customer-facing developer portal is the most visible example. When you ship Svix, your customers get a portal where they can see every webhook event you sent to them, the delivery status, the payload, and the timestamp. If a delivery failed, they can see why. If they want to retry it, they can trigger a resend themselves, without filing a support ticket. This is an entire product surface — auth, event history UI, resend flows — that Svix ships for you. Building it yourself takes two to six weeks depending on your team.

The retry schedule is serious engineering. Svix uses exponential backoff with 11 retry attempts over the course of five days. The schedule starts aggressive — first retry within a few seconds — and backs off dramatically as time passes. The practical effect is that transient failures (momentary downtime, deployment windows, cold starts) recover quickly, while persistent failures don't hammer a struggling endpoint indefinitely.

Ninety-day payload retention means that even a week after a delivery failure, the event is still in Svix's system. A customer can log into the portal, find the event, and trigger a replay. For most teams building natively, their retry window is much shorter — whatever they store in their own queue before pruning it.

The design intent is worth naming explicitly. Svix is built for platform builders: companies building SaaS products that need to send webhooks to their customers' endpoints. This is the Stripe, the GitHub, the Shopify pattern — you are the provider, your customers are the consumers. Svix handles the delivery layer so your team focuses on the events themselves, not the plumbing.

There is a pricing-tier element to this, but the architecture question comes first. Svix is a managed service with managed pricing. The operational burden is theirs.

The alternative: Convoy

If Svix represents the managed extreme, Convoy is the self-hosted counterpart. Convoy is open-source and designed to give you everything a platform-level webhook sender needs — configurable backoff (you choose linear or exponential), fan-out delivery, a developer portal, event filtering, signatures — while keeping the infrastructure under your control.

The Svix versus Convoy decision is the classic managed-versus-self-hosted question, and both sides are defensible.

Convoy's configurability is real. You can set a linear retry schedule for one endpoint type and exponential for another. You can run it on your own infrastructure, which matters for compliance in some industries. There is no vendor lock-in — if Convoy doesn't work for you, you own the data and the system.

The tradeoff is the same as every self-hosted decision: you run it. You handle upgrades, monitoring, queue capacity, database connections, and the 3 AM alert when the Redis queue starts behaving strangely. Your ops team owns that surface.

For teams with strong infrastructure capacity, Convoy is a serious option. For teams who want to focus on their product and not their webhook delivery infrastructure, Svix's managed offering removes that operational overhead. Neither answer is wrong. They reflect different organizational priorities.

Where HookTunnel enters the picture

HookTunnel is not a Svix competitor in any meaningful sense — Svix sends webhooks out, HookTunnel receives webhooks in. That distinction is the whole story. See HookTunnel's webhook inspection features for the inbound capture model, and our flat $19/month Pro plan for pricing. For teams evaluating the full webhook tooling market, use the webhook vendor evaluation checklist.

That distinction is the whole story.

Svix is for when you are the webhook provider — your platform sends events to your customers' endpoints, and you need that delivery to be reliable, visible, and recoverable.

HookTunnel is for when you are the webhook consumer — Stripe, Shopify, Twilio, GitHub, and every other provider sends events to your endpoint, and you need those inbound payloads captured, inspectable, and replayable.

If you are building a platform that both sends webhooks outbound to customers and receives webhooks inbound from payment processors and infrastructure services — which is most SaaS companies at some scale — you might legitimately need both tools, pointed in opposite directions:

[Your customers' servers]
        ↑
        | outbound (Svix handles this)
        |
[Your platform]
        |
        | inbound (HookTunnel handles this)
        ↓
[Stripe / Twilio / GitHub / Shopify]

Svix handles the top half of that diagram. HookTunnel handles the bottom half.

The specific problem HookTunnel addresses on the inbound side: when Stripe sends a payment webhook to your endpoint at 2 AM and your handler fails, that event is gone from Stripe's delivery attempt. You get some provider-side retries, but once those exhaust, you're relying on whatever you captured locally. HookTunnel captures the raw HTTP payload at the boundary — headers, body, timestamp, everything — and keeps it replayable within your history window. Pro accounts can replay the original HTTP request to any target, including a different handler URL.

This is not a retry schedule. It is a time machine for events that already arrived.

Placing the tools on the map

| | Svix | Convoy | HookTunnel | |---|---|---|---| | Direction | Outbound (you → customers) | Outbound (you → customers) | Inbound (providers → you) | | Hosting model | Managed SaaS | Self-hosted open-source | Managed SaaS | | Payload retention | 90 days | Configurable | Free: 24h / Pro: 30d | | Customer portal | Yes, built in | Yes, built in | No (you're the customer) | | Replay | Yes | Yes | Pro tier | | Pricing model | Usage-based tiers | Free to self-host | Free / $19 Pro | | Best for | Platform builders | Infra-heavy teams | Webhook consumers |

Reading the room

Svix is one of the most thoughtfully built webhook platforms in the market. The customer portal alone — the ability to hand your customers direct visibility into their webhook delivery history and the controls to recover from failures themselves — is worth serious consideration for any platform building an outbound webhook system. The retry engineering is sound. The 90-day retention window is genuinely useful for incident recovery.

If you are a platform builder shipping webhooks to customers at any scale, Svix deserves a real evaluation. The managed overhead is the tradeoff, and for most teams it is a favorable one.

If you are drowning in inbound webhook failures from Stripe and GitHub — handlers that crashed, events that fired during a bad deployment, payloads you need to replay against a fixed handler — there is now a tool built specifically for that side of the equation.

There has been a gap in this market for a while. The outbound side had Svix and Convoy. The inbound side had Hookdeck for sophisticated routing and queue management, and a lot of manual work for everyone else. HookTunnel is a new entry on the inbound side: stable URLs, automatic capture, and Pro replay. It is not trying to be Svix. It is trying to solve the problem Svix does not touch.

Your architecture probably has both problems. It is worth knowing there are now good tools pointed at each direction.