Fair question — we’re not eliminating failure so much as isolating it behind a system that’s purpose-built for durability. Our infra is built with redundant queues, retry pipelines, and observability you typically wouldn’t stand up for a single product team.

And on the data side, we don’t use webhook payloads for anything other than delivery. They’re encrypted at rest, transit, and automatically purged based on retention settings.

Stripe does retries right, no argument there.

Where things get messy is when you have a mix of providers with wildly different retry behaviors, or internal services that have their own rate limits or downtime windows. A relay layer keeps the intake consistent even when the rest of the system isn’t.

Fair point. The value isn’t in reducing the number of components, it’s in swapping a fragile one (your app endpoint) for something built specifically to stay up, queue, retry, and give you visibility when the rest of your stack isn’t. There are plenty of other services on the market that offer similar services.

Your approach works, and lots of teams do exactly that. The tradeoff is that you’re now on the hook for uptime, retries, backpressure, tooling, on-call, metrics, etc.

Relae exists for teams who’d rather outsource that operational surface, similar to why people use managed queues instead of running their own RabbitMQ. Not everyone needs it — but some prefer not to own that part of the stack.

Svix is a solid managed webhook solution, and their platform is clearly geared toward enterprise teams. For smaller teams or startups, the same reliability patterns—durable delivery, retries, replay—are valuable but often at a lower cost point. That’s where products like Relae aim to make sense: providing similar operational guarantees in a way that’s more accessible for non-enterprise use cases.