Why Webhooks as a Service?
You might think, I have an amazing engineering team. Surely they can figure out webhooks themselves? Even a well funded Silicon Valley startup with a strong engineering culture like Lob recently revamped their system using our webhook service. They were able to successfully simplify the design to make their engineers’ lives easier, increase scalability, add features to their dashboard, and make their cost structure more predictable.
What is webhooks as a service?
Webhooks as a service is a managed platform that sends webhooks on behalf of your product. Your application calls its API when an event happens, and the service stores the message, signs it, delivers it to each customer’s webhook endpoint, retries failures on a published schedule, and gives customers a delivery log they can replay from.
The term describes a sending platform, as opposed to a webhook gateway or proxy that sits in front of endpoints you receive on. Svix is one such platform; the webhook infrastructure entry lists each component a service like it replaces.
Here are 6 reasons why you should use Svix for your webhooks:
Engineering Resources
Your engineering resources are extremely precious. Engineers can have an incredible amount of impact on your product but they’re also very expensive. You want them to be adding core value to your product instead of spending time solving infrastructure problems that have already been solved by 3rd party APIs.
Domain Expertise
At Svix, we do webhooks all day every day. We’ve solved a multitude of problems that arise specifically from webhook implementations at scale and we know we’ll keep finding and solving for more edge cases. With Svix, you get the benefit of our solutions without having to run into the problem yourself.
Developer Experience
Many popular apps like Slack and Sendgrid have very good webhook implementations. As more API providers start offering world class webhook experiences, more developers will want and even expect their APIs to offer webhooks instead of forcing them to use API polling for real time updates. In fact, a poll conducted by Wufoo (now part of SurveyMonkey) found that 82% of developers preferred working with webhooks over API polling.
Speed to Launch
Because we’ve solved a lot of the difficult scaling issues with webhooks and offer access to our infrastructure through APIs, you can launch your webhooks feature very quickly. If you already have a PRD with the events you need want to expose to your customers, you could conceivably launch in a few days instead of the months you would need to spend designing and building your infrastructure.
Security
Svix is SOC 2 certified and GDPR compliant out of the box. We encrypt all data in transit and at rest.
Easy Zapier Integration
We offer a Zapier integration tool that takes your Svix webhooks implementation and generates a Zapier integration package in 1 click.
How to choose a webhook service
The best webhook service for an API product is one that signs every payload with HMAC-SHA256 over a timestamp and the body, retries failed deliveries on a published exponential backoff schedule spanning at least a day, keeps per-attempt delivery logs your customers can replay from, and isolates tenants so one customer’s failing endpoint never delays the rest. Check those four before comparing price.
| Check | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|
| Signing | HMAC-SHA256 with the message ID and timestamp in the signed content, plus verification libraries. Svix sends svix-id, svix-timestamp, and svix-signature headers and follows the Standard Webhooks spec. |
| Retries | A documented schedule. Svix retries after 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours, and 10 hours: eight attempts over about a day. |
| Visibility | Delivery logs, endpoint health, and manual replay exposed to your customers, not only to your team. |
| Pricing | Billed on message volume rather than per endpoint or per customer, so cost follows usage. |
Summary
Webhooks are becoming a must have feature for APIs. Instead of taking months of your engineering resources designing and building infrastructure, launch a reliable, secure, scalable webhook experience in days with Svix. For a detailed breakdown of the tradeoffs on each side of that decision, see our webhooks build vs. buy comparison.