The real cost of ignoring webhooks

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting webhooks. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Webhooks replace polling with something closer to real time
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Always verify the signature before trusting a payload. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to do next

Assume delivery can repeat and design for it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

The short version

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about webhooks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Assume delivery can repeat and design for it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.