Svix is a solid managed webhook solution, and their platform is clearly geared toward enterprise teams. For smaller teams or startups, the same reliability patterns—durable delivery, retries, replay—are valuable but often at a lower cost point. That’s where products like Relae aim to make sense: providing similar operational guarantees in a way that’s more accessible for non-enterprise use cases.
Your approach works, and lots of teams do exactly that. The tradeoff is that you’re now on the hook for uptime, retries, backpressure, tooling, on-call, metrics, etc.
Relae exists for teams who’d rather outsource that operational surface, similar to why people use managed queues instead of running their own RabbitMQ. Not everyone needs it — but some prefer not to own that part of the stack.
Fair point. The value isn’t in reducing the number of components, it’s in swapping a fragile one (your app endpoint) for something built specifically to stay up, queue, retry, and give you visibility when the rest of your stack isn’t. There are plenty of other services on the market that offer similar services.
Where things get messy is when you have a mix of providers with wildly different retry behaviors, or internal services that have their own rate limits or downtime windows. A relay layer keeps the intake consistent even when the rest of the system isn’t.
Fair question — we’re not eliminating failure so much as isolating it behind a system that’s purpose-built for durability. Our infra is built with redundant queues, retry pipelines, and observability you typically wouldn’t stand up for a single product team.
And on the data side, we don’t use webhook payloads for anything other than delivery. They’re encrypted at rest, transit, and automatically purged based on retention settings.
Good question! Svix does offer similar things - they’re the established player with enterprise customers.
Key differences:
• Pricing: Svix’s professional tier starts at $490/month. Relae’s Launch plan is $35/month for 100K events ($0.00015 per additional), Scale is $65/month for 500K events ($0.0001 per additional)
• Scope: Svix offers a full platform (sending, receiving, testing, compliance). Relae is focused specifically on reliable receiving for now
• Market: Svix is enterprise-focused with SOC 2, HIPAA, 99.999% SLA. Relae is targeting developers and smaller teams
Honestly, if you need enterprise compliance or you’re processing millions of webhooks, Svix makes sense. I’m trying to offer a simpler, more affordable option for indie devs and smaller teams who just need reliable webhook receiving without the enterprise price tag.
Hi HN! I’m launching Relae (https://relaehook.com), a webhook relay service that ensures you never lose critical webhook data from services like Stripe, Shopify, or any other provider.
The Problem
I’ve worked at several companies where debugging lost webhooks was a recurring nightmare. You’d discover hours or days later that critical events from Stripe, Shopify, or other providers never made it through. Someone’s deployment killed the server, a bug caused a 500, or the endpoint timed out.
Every time, it meant manual data reconciliation, customer support tickets, and eventually building one-off retry logic. I saw different teams solve this problem from scratch over and over.
Most webhook providers only retry a few times over a short window, then give up. You’re left manually reconciling data or building your own retry infrastructure.
What Relae Does
Relae sits between webhook providers and your app:
1. Automatic retries – Exponential backoff up to 5 attempts
2. Dead letter queue – Failed webhooks don’t disappear; review and manually retry them
3. HMAC signature verification – Security built-in
4. Real-time monitoring – See delivery status, failures, and retry attempts
5. Custom headers – Add authentication or routing metadata
It’s basically the infrastructure you’d build yourself, but as a service.
Why I Built This
After seeing teams at multiple companies solve the same webhook reliability problem from scratch, I realized this is infrastructure that shouldn’t need to be rebuilt every time. I wanted something simple: point your webhooks at Relae, and we handle the reliability guarantees so you don’t have to.
Tech Stack
Backend written in Go, running on DigitalOcean droplets. Focused on low latency and reliability without the complexity of serverless. Free tier includes 10k events/month, which is plenty for most side projects.
What I’m Looking For
Feedback on the product, the pricing, and whether this solves a real problem for you. I’m also curious if there are specific features that would make this more useful (batching, filtering, transformations, etc.).
Free tier available – no credit card required. Would love for you to try it and let me know what you think!
