Webhook Inbox vs DIY SQS + Lambda + DLQ
A practical comparison for SaaS teams who already have a webhook handler and are tempted to "just stick SQS in front of it" instead.
TL;DR
The DIY stack works if your team has a senior backend engineer with a free week. Webhook Inbox is for teams that have had webhook outages and don't want to spend that week now.
Setup time
DIY: API Gateway, an SQS queue, a Lambda for signature verification, another Lambda (or direct integration) for forwarding, a DLQ, IAM policies, redrive rules, dashboards, alerts. Realistic timeline: 3–7 days for an experienced AWS engineer. Longer if you've never wired SQS+Lambda before.
Webhook Inbox: Change the provider webhook URL, copy the signing secret. ~5 minutes.
Provider signature verification
DIY: You write the HMAC-SHA256 verification yourself, using Stripe's library, Shopify's client-secret HMAC rules, or a ported version. You must remember to verify on replay too — many DIY rigs skip this and trust messages that have been sitting in SQS, which defeats the purpose.
Webhook Inbox: Built in. Verification happens before the event is stored.
Unverified payloads are recorded as verification_status: failed and never
forwarded.
Replay UX
DIY: "Replay" means pulling a message off the DLQ and re-driving it through SQS. The dev needs CLI access. There is no UI; the audit trail is whoever was on call last quarter. If the original handler ate the body during processing, you have nothing to replay.
Webhook Inbox: One button per event in the dashboard. Original body and headers are preserved (we never deserialize them before storage). Each replay adds a new row to the delivery-attempts timeline; the original event is never mutated.
Per-event retry control
DIY: Build a custom flag table and check it in your worker. Most teams skip this and end up cancelling DLQ messages by hand when a single event is causing a cascade.
Webhook Inbox: PATCH /api/events/<id>/retry with
{"enabled":false}. Same toggle exists at the source level for planned outages.
Searchable archive
DIY: Events are in CloudWatch logs. Searching by provider
event.id requires either log insights queries (slow, expensive on large volumes)
or a separate ingestion into your analytics warehouse.
Webhook Inbox: All events live in ClickHouse, indexed by source, provider event id, event type, status, and time. Queries are sub-second on 100M-row datasets.
Cost at 1M events / month
A back-of-envelope calculation, very roughly:
| Component | DIY (AWS, us-east-1) | Webhook Inbox |
|---|---|---|
| Ingest | API Gateway: ~$3.50/M requests | Included |
| Compute | Lambda + retries: $20–40 | Included |
| Queue | SQS: $0.40/M requests | Included |
| Storage (90 days raw) | S3 + DynamoDB: $5–15 | Included |
| Engineering time | 3–7 days, then ongoing maintenance | None |
| Subtotal | ~$30–60 + your time | $19 / mo Pro · $99 / mo Business |
The headline AWS number looks similar. The hidden cost is the engineering week you traded for a system you now own forever, including its 3am pages.
When DIY wins
There are real cases where you should not buy this:
- You have strict data-residency rules that forbid sending webhook payloads to a third-party server. (We have a self-hosted tier — but a private S3 bucket is closer to your security team's mental model.)
- You already have a mature event-pipeline platform (Kafka, Kinesis, etc.) and webhook ingestion is a 30-line addition to it.
- Your webhook traffic is so low (< 100 events/day) that any failure is something you'll just notice in the morning.
When Webhook Inbox wins
- You've been bitten by a webhook outage in the last 12 months.
- Your billing, provisioning, or order workflow depends on provider events arriving, and you want evidence of every single one in an audit log.
- You don't want to write your own retry scheduler with backoff again.
- Your handler service deploys frequently, and you'd like deploys to not equal "lost events for 90 seconds."
What this comparison does not include
- Outbound webhooks (sending events from your app to customers). DIY-on-AWS has reasonable patterns; Webhook Inbox does not do this yet.
- Outbound multi-provider routing. Webhook Inbox accepts Stripe and Shopify inbound events, but it is not a general event bus for sending app events to customers.
- Enterprise-scale SLAs and compliance certifications. Both can get there; it's a question of whose engineers are doing the work.
Start a pilot → Stripe setup guide Shopify setup guide
Last updated 2026-04-30. Numbers are rough estimates; replace them with your own AWS bills if you want a real comparison.