How webhooks.io Uses Configurable Retry Policies to Ensure Delivery

Most webhook tools ship with a retry policy. Almost none of them ask you what kind of retry policy you want.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not.

The retry strategy is load-bearing. The wrong one does not just fail to recover events — it actively makes your incident worse. See webhook retry storms for how aggressive retries compound outages, and the G2 reviews for webhooks.io for user-reported patterns. See also the webhooks.io documentation for current policy configuration options. Immediate retries hammer a struggling server. Too-aggressive exponential backoff recovers slowly after a transient failure that would have cleared in 30 seconds. No retries at all leaves you with an event that fired once, failed once, and is now somewhere in a provider's dead letter queue or gone entirely.

webhooks.io made an unusual decision: they let you choose. That configurability is underrated in the coverage this tool typically gets.

webhooks.io's retry system: three options, one clear philosophy

webhooks.io surfaces three retry policy options at configuration time. The ability to choose between no retry, linear, and exponential is more valuable than it might appear — different webhook sources have fundamentally different failure patterns.

No retry. The event fires once. If the endpoint does not respond with success, the delivery attempt is recorded as failed and nothing else happens. This is not as reckless as it sounds for certain use cases. If you are building a system where duplicate delivery is worse than lost delivery — financial transactions that should only commit once, idempotency concerns where your downstream cannot reliably deduplicate — no-retry is sometimes the right call. You get a clean failure record in the dashboard and a manual resend option. You stay in control of when and whether to retry, rather than having a scheduler make that call for you.

Linear retry. Fixed intervals between attempts. Each retry happens after the same delay. This is predictable, which is its primary virtue. If you know your handler typically recovers within a specific window — say, it restarts on failure and takes about 30 seconds — a linear retry schedule with 60-second intervals will catch most recoveries cleanly. There is no uncertainty about when the next retry will arrive. The downside is that linear retry does not adapt to the nature of the failure. A handler that is failing due to a cascading database issue will be retried at the same rate whether it is recovering or getting worse.

Exponential backoff. The standard reliability engineering choice for most systems. Early retries are dense — you catch transient failures that clear quickly. Later retries back off significantly — you stop hammering an endpoint that is persistently broken and give it time to recover. webhooks.io's exponential option follows this curve.

The ability to choose between these at the policy level is more valuable than it might appear. In practice, different webhook sources create different failure patterns. An endpoint that receives Stripe payment events has different recovery characteristics than one receiving GitHub push notifications. The payment endpoint might be under higher load, more likely to be temporarily rate-limited, and more critical to recover quickly. The GitHub endpoint might be fine with longer backoff. One size does not fit all, and webhooks.io does not force one.

Success definition: 2xx and 3xx. This is a subtle but meaningful detail. Most retry systems treat 2xx as success and anything else as failure. webhooks.io treats both 2xx and 3xx responses as successful delivery. The practical effect: if your endpoint redirects (returning a 301 or 302), webhooks.io counts that as delivered rather than retrying. Some endpoints redirect as a routing pattern — the redirect goes to the real handler. Counting 3xx as success avoids unnecessary retries in those architectures. It is a reasonable default, though teams expecting retries on redirects should verify their handlers respond with 200 rather than relying on redirects.

4xx and 5xx: Non-success codes trigger the configured retry policy. Timeouts also count as failures. After the retry attempts exhaust, the event is available for manual resend from the dashboard. webhooks.io's dashboard shows delivery history, response codes, and the timeline of retry attempts — enough information to diagnose what went wrong without pulling server logs.

Pricing starts at $9/month for the Developer tier. That entry point is accessible for small teams who need a managed webhook delivery layer without Hookdeck's $39/month floor.

Hookdeck: at-least-once, 50 retries, the heavier guarantee

Hookdeck is the direct comparison here — both are production webhook management systems, both address delivery reliability, both give you a dashboard surface for inspecting events. The engineering quality is comparable. The product philosophy diverges in instructive ways.

Hookdeck's delivery model is at-least-once with automatic retry up to 50 attempts. You do not configure the retry count or the retry strategy — Hookdeck decides. The tradeoff for that reduced configurability is a stronger delivery guarantee. Fifty retries with intelligent backoff is substantially more persistent than any manual configuration a team will typically set.

Hookdeck also ships features that webhooks.io does not: event routing (send different event types to different handler URLs), payload transformations before delivery, filtering logic, and SOC2 Type II compliance documentation. For teams where compliance documentation matters — regulated industries, enterprise customers asking about your data handling — SOC2 is a real differentiator.

The practical comparison:

| | webhooks.io | Hookdeck | |---|---|---| | Retry policy | Configurable: none / linear / exponential | Automatic at-least-once (up to 50 retries) | | Retry count | Configurable | Up to 50, managed | | Event routing | Basic | Advanced, with filters | | Payload transformations | No | Yes | | SOC2 compliance | Not documented | Yes, Type II | | Dashboard | Delivery history, resend | Full event lifecycle | | Starting price | $9/month Developer | $39/month Team |

webhooks.io wins on configurability and entry-level pricing. Hookdeck wins on delivery depth, feature surface, and compliance guarantees. For a small team with a specific retry use case and a tight budget, webhooks.io is the pragmatic choice. For a team that needs comprehensive event management and is prepared to pay for it, Hookdeck's heavier feature set earns its price.

Both tools are pointing at the same problem: getting webhooks from a provider to your handler reliably. The job they are doing is the same job.

HookTunnel: no retry policy — and that is the point

HookTunnel does not have a configurable retry policy. This is worth explaining rather than glossing over, because the absence is intentional and reflects a different model for thinking about webhook incidents. A retry policy catches the three-minute deployment window. A captured payload survives the bug that took three days to diagnose and fix. For the full incident recovery workflow, see the webhook outage recovery playbook. See HookTunnel pricing for the flat $19/month Pro plan.

webhooks.io and Hookdeck are delivery systems. The retry policy governs what happens when delivery fails: how soon to try again, how many times, with what backoff curve. The retry policy is the failure recovery mechanism.

HookTunnel is a capture system. When a provider like Stripe, Twilio, or GitHub sends a webhook to your HookTunnel URL, HookTunnel immediately captures the full HTTP request — method, headers, body, timestamp — and returns 200 to the provider. The provider considers the event delivered. HookTunnel holds the payload.

What this means operationally: the question of whether your handler processed the event correctly is decoupled from the question of whether the event was captured. The event is always captured. Whether your handler ran, whether it succeeded, whether your database was up — none of that affects capture. When you want to process the event (or reprocess it after fixing a bug), you initiate a Pro replay against any target URL you specify.

The result is a different incident response model:

webhooks.io/Hookdeck model (retry-based):

Provider fires webhook
        ↓
Delivery attempted to your handler
        ↓
Handler fails → scheduled retry after N seconds
        ↓
Retry attempts until success or exhaustion
        ↓
Manual resend if exhausted

HookTunnel model (capture-first):

Provider fires webhook
        ↓
HookTunnel captures payload → 200 to provider
        ↓
Forward to handler (best effort)
        ↓
Handler fails → payload safe in HookTunnel
        ↓
Fix the bug
        ↓
Pro replay to any target, on demand

The two models solve different moments in a webhook incident's lifecycle. Retry automation is the right tool when the failure is a transient connectivity or availability issue — the handler will be fine in a few minutes, you just need to keep trying. Replay forensics is the right tool when the failure is a logic error — a bug in your handler, a schema mismatch, a missing dependency — and you need to fix the code before you can process the event correctly.

In practice, both scenarios happen. A well-equipped team might use webhooks.io's linear retry for transient availability events and HookTunnel's Pro replay for bug-induced failures where they need to control exactly when and how events re-enter the system.

HookTunnel is free for one hook with 24-hour event history. Pro is $19/month for 10 hooks, 30-day history, and Pro replay. No per-event pricing. The cost scales on plan tier, not event volume.

What you are actually buying

The real question in choosing between these tools is not which has better retry logic. It is which failure mode you are primarily trying to solve. Use the webhook vendor evaluation checklist to structure this decision across pricing, support, and retention dimensions.

If your primary concern is: "The provider sent the event and my endpoint was briefly unavailable — will I lose it?"

Configurable retry automation is the answer. webhooks.io's linear or exponential policies, or Hookdeck's at-least-once, will keep attempting delivery until your endpoint recovers. You configure the aggression, they handle the scheduling.

If your primary concern is: "My handler had a bug, failed on real production events, and I need to replay those specific events after I ship the fix — but only the ones that didn't already partially commit"

Replay forensics is the answer. Having the raw HTTP payload, captured at the moment of receipt, available for targeted replay to any destination — including a staging environment where you can verify the fix — is a different kind of insurance than a retry policy. HookTunnel's Pro replay gives you that.

Neither tool makes the other irrelevant. A retry policy catches the three-minute deployment window. A captured payload survives the bug that took three days to diagnose and fix.

The new dog in the neighborhood

webhooks.io's configurability is pragmatic and underappreciated. Handing developers the choice between no retry, linear, and exponential — and trusting them to know which failure mode they are solving — is a respectful product decision. Most tools do not offer that choice.

But retries and replay are two tools for two different moments in a webhook incident's lifecycle. Retry automation recovers from outages. Replay forensics recovers from logic failures. They are not substitutes.

There is now a tool that made inbound capture and replay its entire product — stable URLs, full HTTP payload history, and Pro replay on demand. It is not trying to replace webhooks.io or Hookdeck. It is solving the moment they do not: not the retry attempt, but the "I have the event, I need to replay it correctly" moment that comes after the bug is fixed and the incident is ready to close.

It is worth ten minutes of your time to understand whether that moment is one you have been solving manually.