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30 Comments

Finally! Webhooks as a Service

Hey all,

I wanted to introduce our new product called HostedHooks! It's a Webhooks as a Service platform for developers.

Implementing a webhook sending solution that scales, along with a subscriber experience is not easy. We've taken all of that complexity and boxed it up into an easy to use service + API.

The service comes with:

  • provider portal (sending webhooks)
  • subscriber portal (receiving webhooks)
  • retries / exponential backoff
  • SSL and advanced security (signatures)
  • reporting
  • easy to use API

and much more is in development.

While in Beta we are slowly letting new users on as we can handle it and wanted to invite any IndieHackers to join the waitlist. You can sign up here - www.hostedhooks.com

From the Indie Hacking perspective, we are small team of 1.5. Have been building this for the last few months. The frontend is Tailwind (if not obvious), backend is Rails.

About me, my name is Ian, I've been developing for over a decade now and have built lots of products over the years. This is my first developer tool, which I am very excited about since it hits close to home.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Best,

  1. 6

    This is wild! For the last few years, as I worked on my previous startup, I kept an eye out for a service like this, but never really found anything, so I started working on this exact thing at the beginning of the year, too!

    Since then, multiple services have been announced/launched:

    Yours: http://www.hostedhooks.com/
    Diahook (YC funded): https://diahook.com
    The honeybadger folk: https://www.hookrelay.dev/
    and a number of exploratory posts here on IH.

    I'm sure there's some Baader-Meinhof thing going on, but not entirely!

    When I started thinking about this space, I was a bit put off by the lack of any other services - made me wonder if there's a viable business there - still wonder that - but now with at least 4 or so competitors, that's going to at least lend some credibility to the space as well as make positioning easier.

    Looking at everybody's pricing and docs, all the services are about 99% the same, down to almost identical API calls, and everybody's also settled on the same pricing, more or less...

    Differentiation is going to be interesting...

    So, congrats on launching/announcing! Let's all hope for traction in the space, and a big enough market to support a few companies!

    1. 2

      Hey @Edwardmsmith, funny how that works! What's yours called?

      Yeah I think there is plenty of room for multiple players in the space. The lowcode/ nocode movement is only growing and _______ as a service will continue to get more popular as software dev is commoditized.

      Differentiation will be interesting for sure. I honestly think Webhooks are underutilized right now because they are so heavy to build. The market will grow once there are some good and easy solutions out there.

      Thanks for the reply!

      1. 1

        I'm going with https://whooky.io - but there's not really any public info yet.

  2. 4

    Nice work! There is so many new projects in the space I'm stoked to see how it pans out. The has been very little pressure on platforms to offer good webhooks, many integrations are pretty barebone and I hope adoption of your product will help with that. We've also been building https://hookdeck.com which is tackling a related problem but for incoming webhooks instead of outgoing. Receiving webhooks at scale reliably requires a lot of work and well-thought-out infrastructure. I'll reach out to you!

    1. 2

      Very cool, I love your landing page. Would love to chat!

  3. 3

    My friend runs diahooks, how are you different?

    1. 1

      Yeah good question, I don't know enough about them to say.

      Will be interesting to see what directions we all go in.

  4. 3

    The landing page looks nice too. Do you mind if I ask what you used to implement the documentation page?

  5. 3

    Haha, I also thought about this space a while ago but never followed through with it.

    Before No-Code the use-case seemed too farfetched and I thought a lot of devs would just prefer to roll their own.

    Solution looks good.

    1. 1

      Thanks for checking it out!

      Our biggest competitor is still likely DIY, but I'm hopeful that we can make it easy and cheap enough to justify using an out of the box solution.

      1. 1

        I think for devs maybe but for No-Code I think it makes more sense.

        Anyway it will depend on your stack for some this is easier to do and for others harder, for example SNS will have retry logic built in etc. (not http but for inter service comms I use that quite a bit.)

        Good luck :)

  6. 2

    Congrats :) What concerns me about this kind of services is that webhooks often involve sensitive data, so it's a big ask in terms of trust.

    1. 2

      Thanks for checking it out!

      Totally agree. The security implications come at a cost of ease of use for both the provider and subscriber, but there are ways to solve for this.

      The easy solution is to not pass any sensitive information across (uuids). The harder solution is to encrypt the payload and share that between the sender and receiver. We just act as a proxy in the middle.

      Definitely an important point! Thanks!

  7. 2

    Looks pretty nice.

    Can confirm my day job have spent lots of time developing web hook features.

    If I were you I would raise your prices. Have a minimum monthly cost plus usage or overage. If someone is going to develop software to use you they can afford a min monthly price.

    Good luck 😊

    1. 1

      Hey @StephenN, thanks!

      Yeah that's a good point. We will likely add in tiered features for a base fee but wanted to start off with as few barriers as possible.

  8. 2

    This sounds interesting! I'm currently a no-code founder trying to figure out how to allow users on my site to input some text, have that text sent to another app (via api), and have that app return the end result back to the user on my site. This sounds like it might help!

  9. 2

    TailwindUI for the win!

    1. 1

      oh yeah, I'd be lost without Tailwind

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  10. 2

    Excuse me for my noob question: what are the advantages using your service vs writing a lambda function?

    1. 2

      Not newb, it's a good question.

      You could definitely build a custom webhook delivery system using something like Lambda, but that really is just you taking those events and using a lambda to deliver the webhook to your subscribers.

      Whether you use Lambda or SQS or some other asynchronous way of sending events to your subscribers, you would still need to build the following:

      • store and manage your subscriber endpoints (where the events are being sent)
      • retries - what happens when the webhooks fail?
      • exponential backoff - how often do you retry?
      • any security that you want to support (signing secrets)
      • logging and searching of payloads
      • a portal for your subscribers to login and manage their webhook integration

      Plus scaling and maintenance as your webhooks and subscribers grow.

      That's just some examples of what we support in our platform. So you could go and build that custom, but if you use our platform, you get it for free with a subscription.

  11. 1

    Did you use TailwindUI to build the landing? looks kind of similar.

    1. 1

      Ha, yeah all TailwindUI

      1. 1

        yeah figured, seems like Ive been seeing it everywhere lately.

  12. 1

    Wow! Congrats on this huge achievement!

    I am a first-year student at the University of Adelaide currently studying Bachelor of Psychology (Advanced) Honours. However, I have also taken upon an elective subject in entrepreneurship, and part of my first assessment is to network with entrepreneurs. I would appreciate it If you would kindly take a few minutes to answer a couple of the following questions that I have listed below. Thank You!

    1. What industry are you in and what made you want to join this specific industry?
    2. What was your goal starting out/what motivated you to start a business? Was it out of necessity?
    3. What sort of challenges did you face when starting out? Any sort of financial or emotional burdens? If so, how did you overcome such issues?

    Congrats once again, mate!

  13. 1

    I think that the only thing I would be worried about is this thing becoming a commodity. Lowering the prices too much. Suppose i want to replace your service with another, what would make make me pause or fear? Not a lot.
    Not saying it won't work, but there needs to be some differentiation as i see it. Suppose someone will offer 1m calls for a 1$ :)

    1. 3

      One of the most common concerns that I've heard in customer conversations is being locked in - any scent of lock-in tips the decision to DIY (or a different service) very quickly.

      So, I believe the differentiation needs to be in features/ease-of-use/stability-and-performance.

  14. -2

    This comment has been voted down. Click to show.

    1. 1

      Hey thanks for sharing. Pipedream looks really cool but a completely different product, more akin to Zapier.

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