Webhook Rate Limiting and Backpressure: Surviving a Traffic Spike
An endpoint that handles four events a second meets four hundred. What happens next isn't a crash — it's a cascade, and retries make it worse.
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Guides, comparisons, and deep dives on webhook infrastructure, reliability, and integration patterns.
An endpoint that handles four events a second meets four hundred. What happens next isn't a crash — it's a cascade, and retries make it worse.
Receive Clerk user and session webhooks — verify the Svix signature scheme correctly, reshape the payload, sync your database, and replay failures. No backend required.
Receive Square payment and order webhooks — verify the signature (Square signs the URL plus the body), reshape the payload, route anywhere, and replay failures. No backend.
Receive Linear issue, comment and project webhooks — verify the signature, reshape the payload, route it anywhere, and replay failures — without building a backend.
Receive Typeform submissions as webhooks — verify the Typeform-Signature, flatten the answers, route to Slack/CRM/your API, and replay failures — no backend required.
Step-by-step: receive Calendly booking webhooks, verify the signature, transform the payload, route it anywhere, and replay failures — without writing or hosting a backend.
PayPal verifies signatures by making you call PayPal, which means your handler now depends on their API being up. Setup, verification, and not charging anyone twice.
HubSpot batches events into an array, delivers them out of order, and signs them three different ways. None of that is in the setup screen.
Every Python framework receives a webhook in ten lines. The lines differ in exactly one place — how you reach the raw body — and that's where signature checks go to die.
A Next.js webhook handler is about eight lines, and two of them are usually wrong. Raw bodies, signature checks, and the serverless timeout that quietly eats your events.
Retries handle transient failures. But what happens when every retry is exhausted and a webhook still can't be delivered? Without a dead letter queue, that event is gone forever. Here's how to build one — or skip the work entirely.
Twilio signs every webhook with a scheme that's different from Stripe and GitHub — it includes the URL and sorted POST parameters. Here's how X-Twilio-Signature works and how to validate it correctly.
Bluejay Relay captures, logs, and reliably delivers every webhook. Free to start.
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