How It Works

The capture, store, forward, and retry lifecycle.

The flow

Hookdrop sits between your webhook provider and your server:

Stripe → Hookdrop → Your server

When an event arrives, Hookdrop takes over immediately so your provider gets a fast 200 OK — then handles delivery to your server in the background, with retries if anything goes wrong.

The lifecycle

1. Capture

   The webhook hits your permanent Hookdrop URL. Hookdrop saves it to the database and returns 200 OK to the sender in under 50ms.

   Webhook senders wait for your 200 OK before they consider delivery successful. If your response is slow, they assume failure and start retrying — which creates duplicate events. By separating capture from delivery, Hookdrop responds instantly and handles forwarding asynchronously, so the sender never has to wait.

2. Store

   The full event is persisted in the database — nothing is thrown away:

   • Headers — every request header, including signatures
   • Body — the raw payload exactly as sent
   • Source IP — where the request originated
   • Timestamp — exact time of arrival

   Events remain stored for your plan’s retention period: 24 hours (Free), 7 days (Starter), 30 days (Pro), or 90 days (Team).

3. Forward

   A delivery worker picks up the job and forwards the event to your configured destinations — your local dev server, staging, production, or all three simultaneously. Forwarding uses a 10-second timeout per attempt.

4. Retry

   If your server is unreachable or returns an error, Hookdrop retries automatically with exponential backoff:

   Attempt	Delay
   1st retry	5 seconds
   2nd retry	30 seconds
   3rd retry	2 minutes
   4th retry	10 minutes

   After 4 failed attempts, the event moves to the dead letter queue and you receive an email alert.

5. Audit

   Every delivery attempt is logged with the response code, response body, attempt count, and timestamp. You have a complete audit trail for every event — not just successes.

6. Replay

   Replay any event against any destination at any time, as long as it’s within your plan’s retention window. One click from the dashboard — no configuration required.

   Use replay when you’re bringing up a new destination, recovering from an outage, or testing a code change against a real payload.

Endpoints

Learn how endpoints, destinations, and deliveries relate to each other.

Authentication

Verify webhook signatures and secure your endpoints.