Why Lithic chose Svix to power their webhooks

Lithic makes it easy for companies of all types to issue cards and financial products to their customers.

Lithic started as a spin-off of the successful Privacy.com service, a B2C product for creating virtual cards on the file to help consumers control their expenses. Over time they started exposing an API, and saw a much bigger B2B use-case, and that's how Lithic was born.

We sat down to chat with Kamil Sindi, the head of engineering at Lithic, to hear about their experience using Svix.

Why Webhooks?

Lithic is an API first modern card issuing company. Great webhooks are key to the company's offering and extremely important to their end users. Today, webhooks are included in many of Lithic's most valuable use cases.

Why Svix?

Svix is a fundamental part of the Lithic offering, the product and support act as an extension of the Lithic developer team, moving just as quickly which allows for rapid feature development.

Prior to Svix, Lithic supported just one event type and did not include core Svix features like the ability to resend and replay that are now so valuable to Lithic's customers. Today Lithic offers over 15 event types using Svix, this allows customers to take advantage of resending and filtering events.

The partnership has been amazing, and Svix has really helped with our product velocity.

While the Svix product itself has had an outsized impact on the Lithic offering, the support offered has also played an important role, truly setting Svix apart from other developer tools vendors.

The responsiveness, solution orientation and general industry knowledge is invaluable.

API design is very difficult, it's hard to get right - every company who thinks they can do it themselves ends up making the same mistakes, frankly to be at feature parity with what we can do using Svix today, would take us at least a year.

There were several stand-out selling points considered through Lithics evaluation, one in particular was the ability for Lithic to use their own UID's, "Svix abstracted perfectly eliminating the need for syncing ID's, removing a ton of the data syncing mess typically expected."

Onboarding

The onboarding experience was easy, Lithic was able to get spun up and start testing in minutes, the shared slack channel was a huge help. Lithic customers rely on transactional webhooks for ledgering, so uptime resiliency is critical.

We are confident that no webhook will be dropped!

Customer User Case

Lithic is a very modular card issuer that allows customers to mix and match services based on their specific needs. There are many life cycles to manage including card creation, shipping etc. Lithic uses Webhooks to notify customers of important changes, this eliminates the need for frequent API pulls while providing them with peace of mind.

Challenges Solved by Implementing Svix

I remember asking questions in Slack, the team was hyper responsive, I remember having that great customer feeling of being cared about and getting my questions answered.

Prior to Svix Lithic did not offer retries or multiple event types, there was no internal events system or best practice documentation. Lithic customers wanted to do more with webhooks; they were asking for things like ongoing tracking, ability to query, and observability. Lithic was considering building this offering themselves which would have taken over a year "12 engineer months" to roll out. The Svix integration was rolled out in days immediately enabling significantly wider webhook adoption for Lithic customers.

The Svix team is a force of nature, and the support is 100th percentile. Other engineering teams should really emulate Svix.