Webhooker is an EU-hosted inbound webhook gateway designed to ensure you never lose an event from any provider. It offers a single ingest URL for various services like Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify, acting as a robust intermediary between your webhook senders and consumers. The platform is built with a strong emphasis on reliability, data integrity, and EU data residency.
The core functionality of Webhooker revolves around a three-stage process:
- Receive & Verify: Upon receiving a webhook at its unique ingest URL, Webhooker immediately verifies the signature against the source's scheme (supporting HMAC-SHA256 and SHA1). Requests with invalid signatures are rejected with a 401 status and logged for audit, ensuring only legitimate payloads proceed.
- Persist: Before sending a 200 OK acknowledgment to the provider, the event is written to a durable queue. This critical step guarantees that the event is securely stored, typically within single-digit milliseconds, preventing any data loss even if subsequent delivery attempts fail. Webhooker boasts a p99 acknowledgment time of under 10 milliseconds server-side.
- Deliver & Retry: Once persisted, competing workers fan out the event to your configured destinations. Webhooker employs a sophisticated delivery mechanism, including six attempts over approximately five hours with exponential backoff. It features status-conditional retries and a per-destination circuit breaker to prevent overwhelming a downed service. Any events that still fail after all retries are moved to a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ), from which they can be easily replayed individually or in batches once your services are operational again. This "at-least-once" delivery guarantee ensures events are always delivered, though consumers should be prepared for potential duplicates.
Key features of Webhooker include:
- Signature Verification: Robust security by checking HMAC-SHA256 and SHA1 signatures before accepting payloads, rejecting forged requests.
- Smart Retries & Circuit Breaker: Advanced retry logic with exponential backoff and a circuit breaker to protect your services from being hammered during outages.
- Transformations: Declarative, per-destination payload reshaping and header injection, allowing you to customize event formats for each service.
- Outbound Signing: Forwarded requests are signed, enabling your destinations to verify the authenticity of deliveries from Webhooker.
- Live Tail & Replay: A real-time event stream via Server-Sent Events (SSE), providing a full history and a per-attempt delivery log. Events can be replayed with a single click.
- Delivery Alerts: Configurable alerts per source, notifying you via the app or email when deliveries exhaust retries or a destination's circuit opens.
A significant unique selling point is its EU data residency. Webhooker is exclusively hosted on Hetzner servers in Germany, within the European Union. This means all payloads, delivery logs, and backups remain strictly within EU data centers, never mirrored to US cloud regions. This commitment to EU-only hosting addresses critical GDPR compliance concerns, with retention limits enforced and a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) available for paid plans. Users can set event retention periods to 14, 30, or 90 days, maintaining control over their data.
Webhooker offers a free plan for up to 10,000 events per month, with no credit card required, making it accessible for side projects and evaluation. Paid plans (Pro and Team) offer increased event volumes, more sources/destinations, longer retention, and additional features like ordered delivery and static outbound IPs on the Team plan. The platform aims to provide the essential, unglamorous plumbing for webhook integrations, built once for shared use across all your sources and destinations.
