11 October 2025 · 4 min read
Acknowledge fast, process later
Respond quickly and enqueue the work. Long processing inside the request causes provider timeouts and unnecessary retries.
The endpoint's only job is validating and queueing.
Idempotent handling
Providers retry, so duplicates are guaranteed. Deduplicate on the event identifier before processing.
Store processed event identifiers with a retention window.
Reconcile independently
Webhooks get lost. A periodic poll of the provider's API catches what the webhook stream missed.
Never treat webhook delivery as the only source of truth for anything financial.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing webhook infrastructure for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us