What is a webhook provider?

A webhook provider is the sending side of a webhook integration: the system that detects an event, builds the payload, and delivers it by HTTP POST to the endpoints its consumers registered. The Standard Webhooks specification uses the same term for the role its sending-side requirements apply to. Stripe is the provider of Stripe's webhooks; if your product sends webhooks to your customers, the provider is you.

Sending webhooks?

Svix is the enterprise-ready webhook sending service. It handles signing, retries, and delivery observability, so you can ship a reliable webhook platform in minutes instead of months. Start sending webhooks with Svix.

What the provider owns

The name makes it sound like the job is sending an HTTP request, but the role is defined by everything wrapped around that request.

• Delivery and retries. Persisting each message, attempting delivery, and retrying failures with exponential backoff until acknowledged, which is what upgrades the promise to at-least-once.
• Signing. Generating a secret per endpoint and signing every message so consumers can verify the signature, plus supporting secret rotation.
• Endpoint management. Letting consumers register URLs, subscribe to event types, pause endpoints, and see delivery logs, ideally self-serve rather than through support tickets.
• Protection in both directions. Rate limiting deliveries so a burst doesn't flatten a consumer, disabling endpoints that fail for days, and guarding its own infrastructure against SSRF through consumer-supplied URLs.

Provider versus consumer

The provider initiates; the webhook consumer receives and verifies. The split of responsibilities is clean: the provider owns whether a message arrives, the consumer owns what happens when it does. Reliability work mirrors across the boundary, with the provider retrying and the consumer deduplicating, which is why both entries reference the same handful of concepts from opposite sides.

One system is frequently both. A SaaS product that sends webhooks to its customers while receiving webhooks from Stripe and GitHub is a provider in one direction and a consumer in the other, with the two roles sharing nothing but vocabulary.

Becoming a provider

Consuming a webhook is an afternoon of work; providing webhooks is an ongoing infrastructure commitment, which is the asymmetry behind most build-vs-buy discussions in this space. The retry machinery, signing, per-endpoint secrets, logs, and the consumer-facing management surface all sit on the provider's side of the line. That is the layer Svix provides as a service, and the webhook infrastructure entry describes its pieces for teams building it themselves.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a webhook provider and a webhook consumer?

The provider sends: it detects events, signs payloads, delivers them to registered endpoints, and retries failures. The consumer receives: it verifies signatures, deduplicates, and processes. One company is often both, in different integrations.

Is a webhook provider the same as a webhook service?

Not quite. The provider is the role, whoever sends the webhooks. A webhook service or webhooks-as-a-service platform is infrastructure a provider uses to fulfill that role without building delivery, signing, and endpoint management in-house.

What must a webhook provider guarantee?

The credible baseline is at-least-once delivery with a documented retry schedule, signed payloads with per-endpoint secrets and a rotation flow, delivery logs, and a way for consumers to manage their own endpoints. Providers falling short of that generate support tickets instead of integrations.