Why “It’s Just a POST” Is the Most Expensive Mistake in Webhook Strategy

The Great Webhook Lie

Why “It’s Just a POST” Is the Costliest Assumption

“It’s just a POST call. We’ll wrap it in a job queue, add a few retries, and it’ll be done.”

Familiar? It should be. This is how most webhook architectures begin.

🧪 When simple becomes structural

In early 2023, a mid-sized HR tech company in Western Europe began integrating webhooks into their platform. Clients were asking for event notifications: when a document was signed, a new employee onboarded, or a contract expired.

The product team, under pressure to deliver fast, scoped it as a minor project. One backend engineer was assigned the feature.

“It’s just a push,” he said. “A few HTTP calls. Worst case, we retry with a job queue.”

Three sprints later, the MVP was shipped: a basic dispatcher, hardcoded to POST events to a single URL per client, with limited error handling. Internally, it was celebrated — the team had “delivered webhooks.”

⚠️ Month 2: The edge cases arrive

Two months in, things started to shift. One client missed an event. Then another. Logs were sparse. The team realized:

• Delivery wasn’t reliable.
• The system lacked observability.
• They had no replay mechanism.

To fix this, another engineer was looped in to build basic delivery logs and a manual retry command. Soon, they added basic auth headers. A dead-letter queue. A custom monitoring job.

What was meant to be a “feature” had become a small system. One with no ownership.

🧨 Month 5: Scale hits

A new client onboarded — a payroll automation tool. They needed different endpoints for different event types, and strict SLAs. The current logic didn’t support filtering or routing.

The engineering lead proposed a rewrite of the dispatcher. Meanwhile, customer support escalated requests to see which events had been sent, when, and with what response.

The architecture couldn’t answer that. Another sprint was planned.

📉 By month 9: The real cost appears

By now, four different developers had contributed patches to the webhook system. Each with their own assumptions. Documentation was outdated. Test coverage was minimal. Every incident added fragility.

The system was technically “in production,” but no one wanted to touch it. The codebase had turned into a burden, and the company's priorities had evolved.

In interviews with multiple product and platform teams across sectors — HR, fintech, logistics — this same story repeats. The only variation is when the team realizes they’ve built a distributed system inside a queue job.

🧠 Webhooks are not “just” a POST

Webhooks touch every layer:

• Application logic
• Infrastructure
• Security
• Observability
• Client-facing configuration
• Developer experience

None of these are trivial. And none of them are solved by a single POST.

The lie isn’t malicious — it’s cultural. In a world that romanticizes MVPs and sprints, webhooks look like the easy part.

They’re not.

🧭 Next: A deeper dive into what goes wrong

In the next article:

👉 Anatomy of a Failed Webhook Stack

We’ll break down the exact architecture mistakes that turn a sprint-sized project into a 9-month detour.