Your Webhooks Are Failing Right Now (And You Don't Know It)

HookWatch — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:49:22 +0000

Your Stripe webhook has been returning 500s for the last 6 hours. Customers are paying but not getting access. Your support inbox is filling up. And you have no idea — because nothing in your stack told you.

Sound unlikely? It happened to me.

The Silent Killer of Integrations

I've been building web apps for 5+ years with PHP, Go, and JavaScript. Webhooks are everywhere in my projects — Stripe for payments, SendGrid for emails, GitHub for CI triggers. They're the glue holding modern apps together.

But here's the thing nobody talks about: webhooks fail silently.

When your API goes down, your uptime monitor screams at you. When your database crashes, your error tracker lights up. But when a webhook endpoint starts returning errors? The sender retries a few times, gives up, and moves on. You find out days later when a customer complains.

I learned this the hard way when a payment webhook broke in production. Three days of failed deliveries. Customers charged but never activated. One client gone for good.

"Just Check the Dashboard"

That's what people say. Go to Stripe's dashboard, check the webhook logs.

Sure — if you remember to check. Every day. For every service. Across every project.

I have webhooks coming from 5 different providers across 3 projects. I'm not manually checking 15 dashboards every morning. Nobody is.

What I Actually Needed

After that incident, I made a list of what I wanted:

One place to see all my webhook endpoints across all projects
Instant alerts when something fails — not tomorrow, not next week, NOW
Delivery logs with response codes, latency, and payload details
Uptime tracking so I can see reliability trends over time

I looked at existing solutions. Enterprise tools like Hookdeck cost $200+/month. Other tools focus on webhook testing and development, not production monitoring. I didn't need a webhook gateway or a message queue. I just needed someone to watch my endpoints and yell at me when things break.

So I Built It

I've been working on HookWatch — a webhook monitoring service built specifically for indie developers and small teams.

The idea is dead simple: you register your webhook endpoints, HookWatch tracks every delivery, and if something fails — you get alerted via email, Slack, or Discord. That's it.

No complex setup. No infrastructure to manage. No $200/month bill.

How It Works

1. Add your webhook endpoint URL
2. Configure your alert channels (email, Slack, Discord)
3. HookWatch monitors every incoming delivery
4. Something fails → you know immediately

You get a dashboard showing all your endpoints, their status, recent deliveries, response times, and failure rates. Think of it as "uptime monitoring, but for webhooks."

Why Not Just Build It Yourself?

You could. I almost did. But then I realized:

Storing and indexing webhook payloads at scale isn't trivial
Building reliable alerting with proper deduplication takes time
You need retry logic visibility, not just pass/fail
Every hour spent building monitoring infra is an hour not spent on your actual product

I'd rather pay a few bucks a month and focus on what matters.

What's Next

I'm launching HookWatch soon and looking for early feedback from developers who deal with webhooks daily.

If you've ever been burned by a silent webhook failure (or you're worried you will be), I'd love to hear from you:

What webhook providers do you use the most?
How do you currently monitor webhook deliveries?
What would make a tool like this a no-brainer for you?

Drop a comment or find me on Twitter — I'm building this in public and sharing the whole journey.

I'm a solo developer from Moldova building my first SaaS. If you've been through the indie hacker journey, I'd appreciate any advice too.

Forem: HookWatch