Send Webhooks at a Pace Your API Can Actually Handle
A backfill, a traffic spike, or a batch import on the sending side can turn into hundreds of webhooks arriving at once. Throttling caps how fast Hookbase delivers to a given destination and queues the rest in order, so a downstream API with its own rate limits never gets flooded.
Two Ways to Throttle
Throttling is configured per destination and is off by default. When you turn it on, you pick the mode that matches the limit you're trying to respect — a published requests-per-window quota, or a cap on how much work the receiver can process at the same time. It applies to any destination type, not just HTTP endpoints.
Rate Mode
A maximum number of deliveries per time window. Set a limit anywhere from 1 to 100,000 and measure it per second, per minute, or per hour — whichever unit the downstream API states its own quota in.
Concurrency Mode
A maximum number of deliveries in flight to that destination at once — from 1 to 1,000 simultaneously. The right choice when the receiver's constraint is how many requests it can process in parallel rather than how many it accepts per minute.
Bursts Get Smoothed Out, Not Dropped
Throttling isn't a filter that discards the overflow. Every destination is backed by its own admission-control queue: deliveries that exceed the limit wait their turn and go out as capacity frees up.
One Queue Per Destination
Each destination gets its own dedicated Durable Object running an admission-control queue. Throttling one destination has no effect on the pace of any other — a slow partner API can't hold up the rest of your deliveries.
Strict First-In, First-Out
Deliveries that can't be sent immediately because the limit is already reached wait in order rather than being dropped, reordered, or retried at random. Bursts get smoothed out, not lost.
Optional Queue Depth Limit
Set a maximum wait-queue size and, once it's full, new deliveries are rejected outright instead of queuing indefinitely. A useful backstop when you'd rather fail fast than build an unbounded backlog.
A 30-Minute Ceiling
A delivery can wait in the throttle queue for up to 30 minutes cumulative across retries before the system gives up on it, so nothing sits in the queue forever.
Throttling or Circuit Breaking?
They solve different problems and work well together. Throttling paces traffic to an endpoint that is healthy but has a limit, holding the overflow in an ordered queue. Circuit breakers do the opposite job: they stop sending to an endpoint that is broken, rather than pacing deliveries to one that is fine.
Why This Matters
Webhook traffic arrives in bursts you don't control. What happens next depends entirely on whether anything is pacing it.
An unthrottled burst
With Hookbase throttling
Put a Speed Limit on Your Webhooks
Open a destination, pick rate or concurrency, and set the number. Get started free — no credit card required.
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