DeveloperWeek 2024

Tom Hacohen, Svix, Founder & CEO
Matt McClure, Mux, Co-founder and Head of Developer Experience

Standard Webhooks is an initiative to standardize webhooks and make them better for producers, consumers, and the ecosystem as a whole. The steering committee consists of leaders from Twilio, Kong, Mux, Supabase, Lob, ngrok, Svix, and Zapier.

Webhooks are becoming increasingly popular and are used by many of the world's top companies for sending events to users of their APIs. However, the ecosystem is fragmented, with each webhook provider using different implementations and varying quality. Even high quality implementations vary, making them inherently incompatible. This fragmentation is a pain for the providers and consumers, stifling innovation.

For consumers, this means handling webhooks differently for every provider, relearning how to verify webhooks, and encountering gotchas with bespoke implementations. For providers, this means reinventing the wheel, redesigning for issues that have already been solved (security, forward compatibility, etc.).

We propose a simple solution: standardize webhooks across the industry. This design document outlines our proposal, a set of strict webhook guidelines based on the existing industry best practices. We call it "Standard Webhooks".

This talk will cover the challenges that led to the creation of standard webhooks, the project itself, and how it's already affecting the industry.