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Hookman is in open beta

One stable webhook URL that follows your branch. What it does today, what it costs, and how to try it in a few minutes.

Darren Royle @royletron 2 min read

Every developer who has built against Stripe, Paddle or GitHub webhooks knows the loop. You open a pull request, the preview deployment gets a new URL, and the webhook provider is still pointing at the last one. So you open the dashboard, paste the new URL, save, and try to remember to put it back afterwards.

Hookman is my attempt to stop doing that. Configure the endpoint once, route forever. Hookman is now in open beta.

What it does

You get a stable endpoint, something like https://hookman.dev/w/acme/payments. That’s the URL you give Stripe, once. Behind it you register your deployments (a label and a URL for each branch), and pick which one is live. Every webhook that arrives is forwarded to the active deployment with its headers and body untouched, and your app’s response goes back to the sender verbatim.

Switching branches is one command:

Terminal window
hookman register pr-42 https://pr-42.preview.acme.app/api/webhooks
hookman switch pr-42

Or one click in the dashboard.

More than a switch

Once the endpoint is stable, a few other things get easy:

  • Routing rules send particular webhooks to particular branches, based on a header, a query parameter or a field in the payload.
  • Fan-out mirrors live traffic to extra deployments, such as a staging copy or a teammate’s branch, without touching the provider’s configuration.
  • Logs and replay record every delivery. If your branch was broken when the webhook arrived, fix it and replay the event.
  • Retry on failure (Pro and Team) re-attempts deliveries that didn’t get through.
  • The CLI and GitHub Action register and remove deployments for you as pull requests open and close.

Pricing

Free gets you started with 1,000 webhooks a month and one project. Pro is £12 a month, and Team is £49 a month. The pricing page has the full comparison.

Try it

The quickstart takes about three minutes. If something is rough or missing, I want to hear about it, because the beta is there to find those things.

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