3 days after launching Webhook Watch

Aissatou Lamarana Diallo — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:01:40 +0000

3 days after launching Webhook Watch, I looked at the real numbers — not what I assumed, the actual ones.

62% of visitors are on mobile.

The site wasn't built with that in mind at all. I had to rework the dashboard tables, the navigation, resize everything so it stayed usable on a small screen. It's fixed now — because of that one number.

The other stat that stood out: 81% of visitors are from Guinea. That wasn't the plan — the tool is meant for any developer, anywhere — but if the local community is the one showing up first, maybe that's the community worth listening to first.

Webhook Watch watches your webhooks (Stripe, GitHub, your own API...): it tells you exactly when a delivery fails, retries automatically, and alerts you before your customer notices — no code changes needed on your side.

You can try it free here: https://webhook-watch.vercel.app

🔒 15 founding member spots, price locked for life, until September 30.

I built a tool to stop losing sleep over silently failing payment webhooks (Flutterwave/Paystack/Orange Money)

Aissatou Lamarana Diallo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:58:22 +0000

If you've ever integrated Flutterwave, Paystack, or Orange Money into a product, you know the drill: the payment succeeds, the provider tries to call your webhook endpoint to confirm it, your server hiccups for two seconds (deploy, cold start, whatever), and the callback is gone. The customer paid. Your database doesn't know it. You find out when they complain.

I got tired of this happening on projects I was building, so I built Webhook Watch: a small proxy that sits in front of your real webhook endpoint and makes sure you never lose a delivery silently again.

How it works

Instead of pointing your payment provider at your own endpoint, you point it at a Webhook Watch URL. That URL:

Logs the full request (headers, body, method) before doing anything else
Forwards it to your real endpoint
Records the response status and latency
If your endpoint fails or times out, retries automatically with backoff
Deduplicates retried events from the provider itself, using the delivery ID / idempotency key it sends (Flutterwave and most payment providers retry on their own when they don't get a 2xx without dedup you'd double-process a payment)
Lets you manually replay any specific event from a dashboard if you fixed the bug that caused the failure

Why edge runtime

The receiving endpoint (/api/hook/[slug]) runs on Next.js Edge Runtime rather than a normal serverless function. Under a burst of webhooks a payment provider retrying aggressively, or just real traffic a slow cold start is exactly when you can't afford to drop something. Edge functions spin up faster and don't share the same cold-start profile as regular Node functions on most platforms.

Why idempotency mattered more than I expected

Early on I just logged and forwarded. Then I realized: if my endpoint returns a 500, the provider retries the same event a few minutes later and if I "fixed" it by then, I'd process the same payment twice. So every delivery gets a dedup key extracted from known provider headers (X-GitHub-Delivery, Webhook-Id, etc.) or falls back to a payload id field, enforced with a partial unique index in Postgres. A duplicate delivery gets short-circuited instead of re-forwarded.

What it's built on

Next.js 14 App Router, Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Realtime the dashboard updates live when a new event comes in), deployed on Vercel.

Where it's at

It's live, solo-built, free to start (1 endpoint, 200 events/month, no card required): https://webhook-watch.vercel.app

If you're dealing with payment webhooks especially in markets where the provider's own reliability is inconsistent I'd genuinely like to know if this solves a real problem for you or if I'm missing something obvious. Happy to answer questions about the architecture in the comments.

webdev #showdev #api #payments

DEV Community: Aissatou Lamarana Diallo

3 days after launching Webhook Watch

I built a tool to stop losing sleep over silently failing payment webhooks (Flutterwave/Paystack/Orange Money)

webdev #showdev #api #payments