Hookdeck Outpost Alternative: 35-Day Webhook History From $9.99, Standard Webhooks by Default
Hookdeck Outpost vs Webhook Relay for outbound webhooks: 7-day vs 35-day history, $499 vs $9.99 for 30+ days, default signature scheme, portal, destinations and self-hosting.
Webhook Relay is a Hookdeck Outpost alternative for teams that want a month of delivery history without the $499 plan. Managed Outpost Starter keeps 7 days, and 30-day retention requires Outpost Growth at $499/month plus $10 per million events. Webhook Relay's Outbound Gateway keeps 35 days on every plan from $9.99/month, signs with Standard Webhooks by default, and charges nothing per message. Outpost is ahead on destinations (SQS, Kafka, Pub/Sub and more), a tenant portal, HIPAA and open-source self-hosting.
TL;DR
- Low volume, 7 days of history is enough? Outpost Starter is very cheap: about $9.50 for a million events.
- Want 30+ days of history to answer support tickets? $9.99 on Webhook Relay vs $499+ on Outpost Growth.
- Want customers to verify with any Standard Webhooks library, no config? Webhook Relay's only scheme is Standard Webhooks. Outpost defaults to
x-outpost-signature. - Need queue/event-bus destinations, a tenant portal, HIPAA or self-hosting? Outpost.
Hookdeck Outpost vs Webhook Relay
| Hookdeck Outpost (managed) | Webhook Relay Outbound Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $10 per million events after 50k free; Growth adds $499/mo | Plan price by customers served; no per-message fees |
| History at entry price | 7 days | 35 days |
| Price for 30+ days of history | $499/mo + $10/M | $9.99/mo |
| Retries billed | No | No |
| Default signature | x-outpost-signature: v0=<hex HMAC of body> | Standard Webhooks (webhook-id, webhook-timestamp, webhook-signature) |
| Standard Webhooks | Optional mode | Always |
| Secret rotation | Yes | Yes, 24-hour overlap, both signatures sent |
| Idempotency | Idempotency headers | Idempotency keys on publish, stable webhook-id |
| Retry schedule | Yes | Up to 8 attempts within 48 hours, Retry-After honoured |
| Per-endpoint isolation | Not stated | Each endpoint its own lane: rate limit (50/s default), concurrency, retries |
| Endpoint health | Not stated | failing state, optional auto-disable, manual pause |
| Retry / recover / replay | Yes | Yes, dashboard, API and MCP |
| Payload transformations | No | JavaScript Functions per endpoint |
| Max payload | Not stated | 256 KiB JSON, one message |
| Tenant / consumer portal | Yes | Not yet (next phase) |
| Destinations | Webhooks, SQS, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, EventBridge, Kafka, Hookdeck Event Gateway | HTTPS webhooks (queues next phase) |
| Static IPs | +$100/mo | No for outbound |
| Compliance | SOC 2; HIPAA on Growth | SOC 2 Type II; no HIPAA/PCI |
| SDKs | TypeScript, Go, Python | TypeScript, Go, REST API, MCP tools |
| Open source / self-host | Apache 2.0, Go binary or Docker | No (hosted only) |
| Receive webhooks too | Separate product (Event Gateway, from $39/mo) | Same account and plan |
Outpost details from hookdeck.com/outpost, Outpost pricing and the webhook destination docs, checked 2026-10-10/11. "Not stated" means we didn't find it on those pages. Webhook Relay details from the Outbound Gateway docs.
Cost as you grow
| Messages per month | Webhook Relay (35 days) | Outpost Starter (7 days) | Outpost Growth (30 days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100,000 | $9.99 | ~$0.50 | ~$500 |
| 1,000,000 | $9.99 | ~$9.50 | ~$509 |
| 10,000,000 | $9.99 | ~$100 | ~$599 |
| 50,000,000 | $9.99 | ~$500 | ~$999 |
List prices checked 2026-10-10 on hookdeck.com/outpost/pricing. Webhook Relay: $9.99 Basic covers up to 100 customers, $79.99 Business 500, $249.99 Pro 1,000, at any of these volumes.
Read this table honestly. If 7 days of history is enough, Outpost Starter costs less than Webhook Relay Basic below about 1 million events a month, and less than our Pro tier (needed above 500 customers) below about 25 million. Webhook Relay wins clearly when you want 30+ days of history, when volume grows into the tens of millions, or when you'd otherwise pay for a second product to receive webhooks.
Signatures: what your customers verify
Outpost's default webhook mode sends x-outpost-signature with v0= followed by a hex HMAC-SHA256 of the raw body. A Standard Webhooks mode exists and can be switched on.
Webhook Relay sends only Standard Webhooks headers. The signed content is {webhook-id}.{webhook-timestamp}.{body}, which binds the timestamp into the signature and makes replayed requests detectable. Any Standard Webhooks library verifies it, and so does our free verifier. The receiving guide is written so you can send it straight to your customers.
Where Outpost is strong
- Event destinations. Delivering to customers' SQS, Kafka, Pub/Sub, EventBridge or RabbitMQ is Outpost's headline feature, and we don't do it yet.
- Price per event at low retention. $10 per million with retries free is hard to beat if 7 days is enough.
- Tenant portal for customers to manage and debug destinations.
- Open source. Apache 2.0, with the same code as the managed service.
- HIPAA on Growth.
Where Webhook Relay is different
- History you can support customers with. 35 days of every attempt, request headers and response, on every plan, so "did you send it last month?" has an answer.
- Per-endpoint lanes. One customer's dead endpoint never delays another's deliveries. Failing endpoints are tracked, optionally auto-disabled, and recovered in bulk when they come back.
- Producer-side transforms. Attach a JavaScript Function to one customer's endpoint to reshape the payload or drop events they don't want.
- One account for both directions. Receive Stripe or GitHub webhooks, forward them to localhost or a private network, run tunnels, and send your own webhooks, on one plan. Test your outbound endpoint against the free Webhook Bin with injected failures to watch retries happen.
- Agent-operable. Every outbound operation is an MCP tool.
What we don't have yet: a customer portal, queue destinations, static IPs for outbound, a self-hosted version, a Python SDK, HIPAA/PCI, and more than 1,000 customers per account.
When to pick which
Choose Hookdeck Outpost if:
- your customers want events in their queues or event buses, not only HTTPS,
- you need a tenant portal today, HIPAA, static IPs or a Python SDK,
- you want to self-host an Apache 2.0 server,
- 7 days of history is enough and you want the lowest per-event price.
Choose Webhook Relay if:
- you want 30+ days of delivery history without a $499 plan,
- you want Standard Webhooks with no configuration,
- your volume is growing and you want a bill that doesn't track message count,
- you also receive webhooks or need delivery into private networks.
Moving off Outpost? In Standard Webhooks mode, import each destination's secret if it fits the format (32-100 base64 characters, whsec_ optional) and receivers keep working; in the default x-outpost-signature mode, receivers add Standard Webhooks verification but can keep their key. Follow the Hookdeck Outpost migration guide. The Outbound Gateway is generally available on the Basic, Business and Pro plans. To start, see how outbound webhooks work or read the docs. For Hookdeck's inbound product, see Hookdeck alternative; for every option side by side, see webhooks as a service compared.
