Webhooks are critical pipes that enable software to talk to each other in real-time, powering modern app experiences such as payment successes, order notifications, and build triggers. However, when webhooks fail, it can have significant consequences, including lost revenue, terrible user experiences, and compliance nightmares. A reliable webhook system needs to follow best practices such as verifying event payloads, queuing and retrying failed events, guaranteeing at-least-once processing and idempotency, detecting slow clients, providing visibility, scaling elastically, and using a dedicated solution like Hookdeck Event Gateway. Building a reliable webhook infrastructure from scratch can be challenging and time-consuming, making it more practical to stand on the shoulders of a service built for this problem from day one.