Stop Building Webhooks From Scratch
You have a backlog full of features your users actually want. Retries, signatures, monitoring, dead letter queues: that is 3+ sprints of plumbing. Hook0 is an open-source webhook service that handles all of it. 100 events/day free, no credit card required. Ship in 30 minutes.
What You Actually Have to Build
Sending an HTTP POST is easy. Building a production-grade webhook system is not.
Retry Logic
Two-phase schedules, jitter, max attempts, per-subscription configuration. You will ship bugs here. Everyone does.
Dead Letter Queues
What happens when retries are exhausted? You need DLQ storage, alerting, and manual replay tooling.
HMAC Signatures
Cryptographic signing, key rotation, timestamp validation, replay attack prevention. Get any of this wrong and your customers' data leaks.
Delivery Monitoring
Dashboards, delivery logs, success/failure rates, latency tracking. Your first customer will ask "did my webhook go through?" on day one.
Subscriber Management
Endpoint registration, event type filtering, URL validation, multi-subscription support. This alone is a month of work if you do it right.
Ongoing Maintenance
Database migrations, scaling, on-call rotations, security patches. Six months after launch, someone still gets paged for it at 3am.
Build In-House vs Use Hook0
| Aspect | Build In-House | Hook0 |
|---|---|---|
| Time to production | 3+ sprints (6-12 weeks) | 30 minutes |
| Engineering cost | 2-3 FTE for months | One developer, one afternoon |
| Ongoing maintenance | Continuous (bugs, scaling, patches) | Managed by Hook0 |
| Retry logic | Build from scratch | Built-in with configurable two-phase retries (fast + slow), customizable per subscription |
| Security (HMAC) | Implement and maintain | Automatic on every event |
| Monitoring & logs | Build dashboards | Included out of the box |
| Subscription management | Build a whole UI | Embeddable portal included |
| Vendor lock-in | None (but locked to your code) | None (open-source, self-hostable) |
Ship Webhooks in 30 Minutes
One API call to publish an outbound event. Hook0 is webhooks as a service for event-driven architectures. It handles the rest.
curl -X POST https://app.hook0.com/api/v1/event \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"event_type": "invoice.paid",
"payload": {
"invoice_id": "inv_123",
"amount": 9900,
"currency": "eur"
}
}'Retries, HMAC signatures, delivery logging, subscriber notification: handled.
Common Questions
How long does it take to build webhooks from scratch?
Plan for 3+ engineering sprints minimum. Retry logic, dead letter queues, HMAC signatures, delivery monitoring, subscriber management, endpoint health checking. And that is before your first customer finds a bug.
What is the hidden cost of building your own?
Retry queue maintenance, edge case handling (timeouts, redirects, certificate errors), monitoring dashboards, rate limiting, log storage, subscriber onboarding. None of this stops after v1 ships. It compounds.
How quickly can I integrate Hook0?
Under 30 minutes. One API call to trigger an event. SDKs for Python, Node.js, and others if you prefer.
Can I migrate from a homegrown system?
Yes. REST API and SDKs, so you can run both systems in parallel during migration. No big bang cutover required.
Want more detail? Read the getting started guide in our docs.
You have better things to build
Stop building webhook infrastructure. Start shipping features. Get started in minutes.