Build the reliability layer, or use ours.
Rolling your own webhook and event delivery system is a reasonable choice if you have the time. Here is what you end up owning after the first version works.
Retries and Dead Letters
You write the retry loop, choose the backoff strategy, decide which failures are permanent, and build a place for failed events to wait until someone can replay them.
Spensr Events retries on a fixed schedule (+5s, +30s, +5min, +15min), caps attempts by plan tier (up to 5 on Pro), and moves failed events to a dead-letter store with replay from the console.
Knowing What Happened
You instrument the worker, store delivery attempts, connect inbound events to outbound attempts, and build the screen you will need the first time someone asks whether an event actually landed.
Every inbound event and delivery attempt is logged with status, response code, timing, and payload. Search and replay are built into the console.
Broken Destinations
When a destination goes offline, your retry queue can back up, workers can churn, and the rest of the pipeline can get noisy unless you add circuit-breaking logic.
Spensr Events disables a destination after a set number of consecutive delivery failures, isolating the broken endpoint from the rest of your route. Re-enable it when the destination recovers.
HMAC Signing
You generate a secret per destination, sign each outbound request with HMAC-SHA256, document verification for endpoint owners, and rotate secrets when needed.
Per-destination outbound HMAC-SHA256 signing is configured in the console. Inbound signature verification for sources like Stripe or GitHub is available on the Pro plan.
Time to First Event
Schema, queue, worker, retry logic, dead-letter storage, logs, replay tooling, deployment, and monitoring. It starts as a quick helper and becomes infrastructure.
Create a config, add a destination URL, and point your source at the inbound URL. The anonymous sandbox requires no account, and the first delivery can happen in under a minute.