Durable Webhook Retries

A webhook you don't receive might as well have never happened. Durable retries make sure that never happens — Webhook Relay holds on to every event and keeps trying until your endpoint is ready for it.

The problem: a failed delivery is a lost event

Webhooks arrive whenever the sender feels like it — and that's rarely when your server is at its best. A deploy, a restart, a database hiccup, a five-minute outage, a downstream API having a bad afternoon. Miss the delivery and the event is usually gone for good. Most providers retry a handful of times over a few minutes, then give up.

Then come the questions nobody enjoys. Which payment confirmations did we drop? Why didn't that build trigger? Where did that order go? Reconciling missing webhooks by hand is slow, and some events you simply can't get back.

The solution: deliveries that don't give up

Switch on durable retries for any destination and Webhook Relay takes responsibility for getting the event there. Every webhook is saved to durable storage the moment it arrives, so it survives restarts, crashes and deploys on both ends. If the first attempts fail, delivery doesn't stop — it backs off and keeps trying on a schedule you choose, all the way out to 30 days.

Pick how patient you want to be

Choose a retry schedule per destination:

• Seconds — quick, persistent retries over about 25 minutes. Ideal for endpoints that only ever blip.
• Medium — retries that ramp up over roughly 16 hours, for outages measured in hours.
• Long — keeps going for up to 30 days, so a destination can come back next week and still get its events.
• Custom — set your own delays when you know exactly how your endpoint behaves.

Each retry waits a little longer than the last — exponential backoff — so a struggling server gets room to recover instead of being hammered while it's already down.

How it works

1. Every event is saved first. The moment a webhook reaches Webhook Relay it's persisted, before any delivery is attempted.
2. Fast retries happen right away. Transient blips are usually cleared within the first few attempts, with no delay you'd notice.
3. Stubborn failures go durable. If a destination is still failing after about 15 minutes, delivery is handed to the durable retry engine, which works through your schedule until the event lands or the deadline passes.

You can watch it happen. Stalled deliveries show up clearly in your logs with their next retry time, so you always know what's in flight and what's waiting.

Works everywhere your webhooks go

Durable retries cover both kinds of destination:

• Public HTTPS endpoints — your API, a partner's API, any SaaS webhook URL.
• Internal destinations — services behind your firewall reached through the Webhook Relay agent, even ones that were offline when the event arrived.

Where it earns its keep

• Payments and billing. A processor or your own billing service goes down for an hour. The confirmations wait, then deliver — no manual reconciliation, no lost revenue events.
• Deploys without dropped events. Ship in the middle of the day. Webhooks that arrive during the restart queue up and land the moment your service is healthy again.
• Flaky partner endpoints. Integrating with a service that returns 500s under load? Let it fail and recover on its own schedule instead of writing your own retry plumbing.
• CI/CD and automation. A webhook that kicks off a build or a job is too important to lose to a momentary network glitch.

Stop building retry queues by hand

The durability you'd normally bolt together from a queue, a database and a cron job — done for you, per destination, with a single switch. Pair it with throttling to control exactly how fast those retries reach a recovering server.

Ready to make sure no webhook slips through? Create a free account and turn on durable retries for your first destination.