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

Building a webhook proxy from scratch is one of those engineering tasks that looks small on paper and expands in practice. You need an ingress endpoint to receive the incoming request, logic to parse and validate the payload, a forwarding mechanism to relay it to your destination server, retry logic for delivery failures, a storage layer for request history, and an inspection interface for debugging. None of these pieces are technically hard in isolation; together they represent a week of engineering work that has nothing to do with your actual product.

webhooks.io is built around the premise that this infrastructure should be managed rather than built. The platform provides a hosted webhook proxy with ingestion, forwarding, delivery tracking, and request history — the full stack of what a bespoke webhook proxy would require — as a managed service. For teams that have faced the "build it or buy it" decision on webhook proxying and chosen to buy, webhooks.io is one of the options to evaluate.

Before you start a trial, there are a few things worth understanding: what the Developer plan actually includes, where the limits appear, and a research challenge that's specific to this particular tool. For the full vendor evaluation framework, see the webhook vendor evaluation checklist. The hidden cost of free trials is not the time limit — it's the intellectual investment in learning a platform's configuration model.

What the Developer Plan Actually Includes

The webhooks.io Developer plan covers the core webhook proxy use case:

Ingestion endpoint. webhooks.io provides a URL where your providers can send webhook events. The platform receives the incoming request, stores the payload, and manages forwarding from there. Your provider points at webhooks.io rather than at your own server.

Forwarding to your destination. The platform relays received webhooks to your configured destination URL — typically your application server. The forwarding includes the original headers and body, preserving the payload as it was received.

10 requests per second throughput. The Developer plan supports up to 10 inbound requests per second. For low-to-moderate volume webhook sources, this is typically sufficient. For high-volume producers — a busy payment processor, a real-time data feed — the ceiling can become a practical constraint.

7 days of request retention. The platform stores the full payload of each received request for 7 days. Within that window, you can inspect payloads, check delivery status, and investigate delivery failures. After 7 days, that history is no longer available.

Delivery tracking and retry. webhooks.io tracks whether your destination server acknowledged each delivery and retries failed deliveries on a configurable schedule. This is the core reliability guarantee of a managed webhook proxy.

Basic inspection interface. A dashboard for viewing received events, checking delivery status, and inspecting individual request payloads.

The Developer plan is designed to support development and low-volume production use. The specific limits — throughput, retention, the number of endpoints or buckets allowed — are defined on their current pricing page, which is the authoritative source given how often SaaS pricing changes.

What Paid Plans Add

webhooks.io's higher-tier plans extend the platform in the ways you'd expect:

Higher throughput. Paid plans remove or substantially raise the 10 req/sec ceiling, supporting higher-volume webhook producers without delivery queuing or throttling.

Longer retention. Extended request history — beyond the 7 days on the Developer plan — is typically the first thing teams need when they scale into production. Investigating an incident from two weeks ago requires retention that the Developer plan doesn't provide.

More destinations. If you're routing webhooks to multiple destination servers — perhaps different microservices or environments — paid plans typically support a larger number of configured destinations.

Team access. Multiple team members, shared workspace, and access control are paid-tier capabilities in most webhook infrastructure platforms, and webhooks.io is consistent with that pattern.

Priority support. Direct support access — rather than community-based or self-serve only — is a paid feature.

As with any usage-based or tier-based infrastructure tool, the transition from Developer to paid is driven by whichever limit you hit first: throughput, retention, or team size. Knowing which limit is most likely to matter for your use case helps you evaluate whether the paid tier cost is justified.

The Social Proof Challenge

Here is an honest research problem specific to webhooks.io: as of early 2026, the platform has approximately 2 reviews on G2. That is not a typo. Two independent reviews. With only 2 G2 reviews, you cannot identify recurring patterns — each review is the entire dataset. See the G2 reviews for webhooks.io for the current state, and webhooks.io documentation for the current feature surface. For the full analysis of what low review volume means for evaluation, see webhooks.io review analysis.

For comparison, Hookdeck has dozens of G2 reviews, ngrok has hundreds, and Pipedream has over a hundred. The review volume on those platforms lets you identify recurring patterns — complaints that appear across multiple independent reviewers, praise that shows up consistently, edge cases that bite teams at a specific scale. Review volume is a form of crowdsourced due diligence.

With 2 reviews, that signal is essentially absent for webhooks.io. You cannot draw conclusions about support responsiveness, reliability at scale, or edge case behavior from two data points. Individual reviewers can have idiosyncratic experiences; two reviewers can easily both be outliers.

This doesn't mean webhooks.io is a bad product. Limited review volume can reflect a small but satisfied customer base, a product that hasn't been heavily marketed, or a relatively recent entry to the market. It is not evidence of poor quality.

What it does mean is that you are conducting an evaluation with less independent validation than you'd have for competing tools. That changes the evaluation strategy: rather than relying on aggregated reviewer patterns to surface risks, you need to test directly.

Practical implications when evaluating a low-review-volume tool: test the support channel with a real question before you commit (response time and quality are a signal even when the question is simple). Check the changelog or GitHub activity recency to assess whether the product is actively maintained. Start with a low-stakes webhook — not your Stripe production integration, but a provider where you can tolerate a missed event during the evaluation period. Validate the core forwarding and retry behavior with your actual payload before you configure anything production-critical.

This is more due diligence than you'd need to do for a tool with hundreds of reviews and years of public track record. That's the cost of evaluating a less-reviewed option.

The Hidden Cost of Free Trials: Intellectual Investment

Every webhook proxy platform has a configuration model — some set of concepts you need to understand before you can use the tool effectively. webhooks.io is no exception, though the routing model is simpler than a full event gateway like Hookdeck.

You need to understand how webhooks.io models sources and destinations, how delivery retry is configured, what the webhook inspection interface shows, and how to interpret delivery failure codes. You also need to integrate the platform into your operational workflow: where do you look when a delivery fails? How do you tell the difference between a provider-side problem and a webhooks.io forwarding problem? What's the escalation path if you need support?

None of these questions are hard to answer with a few hours of hands-on exploration. But that time is still an investment. Once you've configured your first webhook source, set up forwarding to your destination, and validated that the retry behavior works as documented, you've built institutional knowledge about how the tool operates. Switching to a different platform means rebuilding that knowledge.

The sunk cost problem is particularly acute with lower-review-volume tools. If a platform has hundreds of reviews and years of public use, you can be reasonably confident that the investment in learning it won't be wasted because an unforeseen issue makes it unusable. With fewer reviews and less public track record, there's more uncertainty about whether the platform will meet your needs at scale.

The practical antidote is a staged investment: use the Developer plan for a real but non-critical webhook before you configure it for production traffic. Validate the throughput ceiling, the retry behavior, and the support channel. Only deepen the integration after that validation. This protects you against discovering a blocking limitation after you've already invested significant setup time.

HookTunnel is designed for minimal upfront investment: a URL exists the moment you visit the site, no configuration is required, and the mental model is as small as it gets. If the validation reveals that what you need is a simple capture layer rather than a full proxy, you've lost nothing.

How HookTunnel Compares

webhooks.io and HookTunnel solve overlapping but not identical problems. 7-day retention vs. 30-day retention is the difference between being able to investigate an incident from two weeks ago and not being able to. See the HookTunnel pricing for the flat $19/month Pro plan details. For the retry policy comparison, see webhooks.io retry policies. Both capture incoming webhook payloads. webhooks.io is focused on forwarding them reliably to your destination server with retry guarantees. HookTunnel is focused on capturing them, storing them, and letting you replay them manually when you're ready.

The distinction matters for how you think about the two tools:

7-day retention vs. 30-day retention. webhooks.io's Developer plan keeps 7 days of request history. HookTunnel's Pro plan keeps 30 days. For incident investigations — where you're looking at what happened two or three weeks ago — the retention window is the difference between being able to answer the question and not being able to.

No throughput ceiling. HookTunnel's Pro plan has no per-request pricing and no throughput cap that would affect typical webhook volumes. There's no equivalent to the 10 req/sec Developer plan ceiling.

Manual replay vs. automatic forwarding. webhooks.io's core value is automatic retry delivery to your server. HookTunnel's replay is manual — you look at a captured request and click replay to send it to any URL you choose. If you need automatic delivery guarantees, webhooks.io's model is better suited. If you need the ability to replay to different destinations or test against a local server, HookTunnel's manual replay is more flexible.

Review volume. HookTunnel is also a newer tool with limited reviews. We won't claim otherwise. The same evaluation discipline applies: test before you commit.

Pricing. HookTunnel's Pro plan is $19 per month flat. No throughput pricing, no per-request charges. webhooks.io's pricing beyond the Developer plan is on their current pricing page. Compare the specific numbers before deciding.

When Review Volume Is Thin, Test the Tool Directly

webhooks.io addresses a genuine engineering problem. Building a managed webhook proxy instead of a custom one is a reasonable architectural choice, and the Developer plan provides enough capability to evaluate whether the platform fits your use case.

The research challenge is real: with 2 G2 reviews, the independent validation that helps you identify risks and limitations is largely absent. That's not a reason to avoid the product — it's a reason to conduct a more deliberate evaluation. Test the support channel. Validate retry behavior with your actual payloads. Check the changelog for evidence of active maintenance. Start with a low-stakes integration.

The free Developer plan is the right starting point. Validate the core behavior before you invest significant setup time, and let the evidence from your own testing — not a thin corpus of public reviews — guide your decision.

Generate a free permanent webhook URL → One permanent URL, no account required, no trial timer — compare it directly against any alternative. Explore webhook inspection features to see what 30-day history and replay look like in practice.