Automatic Webhook Retries With Configurable Backoff
A destination that's down for thirty seconds shouldn't cost you an event. Hookbase retries failed deliveries on its own, spacing the attempts out with exponential, linear, fixed, or fully custom delays — and anything that still fails lands in a Dead Letter Queue you can inspect and replay instead of disappearing.
Four Ways to Space Out a Retry
The backoff strategy is set per endpoint, so a flaky third-party API and an internal service you control don't have to share the same retry rhythm. Every strategy also gets up to 20% random jitter added on top of each delay, so a batch of deliveries that failed together doesn't come back as one synchronized spike.
Exponential (default)
Delays grow with each attempt — 10s, 30s, 120s, then 600s — and stay at 600s for any further attempts. Quick enough to ride out a blip, patient enough to survive a longer outage.
Linear
A steady 30 seconds multiplied by the attempt number, capped at 600s: 30s, 60s, 90s, 120s, and so on. Predictable spacing when you want retries evenly distributed.
Fixed
A flat 30 second delay before every retry. The simplest option, and the right one when your endpoint recovers on a known, short cycle.
Custom delays
Supply your own array of per-attempt delays instead of a formula. Hookbase uses your exact schedule, so you can match a downstream provider’s documented recovery window.
What Exponential Backoff Looks Like
If you change nothing, this is the sequence a failed delivery follows. Each delay picks up its own jitter, so the real timings drift slightly later than the numbers below.
Example retry schedule (exponential, default)
Summed across a default five-attempt sequence, that's roughly 13 minutes of total backoff before a message is considered exhausted. Want to see the numbers for a different strategy or attempt count? Work them out in the free retry calculator before you configure anything.
How Many Attempts You Get
The maximum number of retry attempts is configurable, and the ceiling scales with your plan. Set it lower on endpoints where a stale delivery is worse than no delivery, and higher on the ones that absolutely have to land.
Free
up to 3 attempts
Starter
up to 5 attempts
Pro
up to 10 attempts
Business
up to 15 attempts
See pricing for the full breakdown of what each plan includes.
When Retries Stop
Retrying forever is its own failure mode. Hookbase stops in two situations — and neither one loses your event.
Attempts exhausted → Dead Letter Queue
When a message uses up its retry attempts it moves to a Dead Letter Queue rather than being silently dropped. The failed delivery is still there to inspect — payload, destination, and what went wrong — and you can replay it manually once the endpoint is healthy again.
Circuit breaker open → retry skipped
If the destination's circuit breaker is open, the retry is skipped without consuming an attempt — so a known-down endpoint doesn't burn through your retry budget while it's offline.
Why This Matters
Retry logic looks like ten lines of code right up until the first real outage.
Rolling your own retries
Hookbase
Jitter, not a stampede
When a destination goes down, everything queued for it fails at roughly the same moment. Without jitter, they'd all come back at the same moment too — knocking over the endpoint just as it recovers. Randomizing each delay by up to 20% smears that spike out.
Do the math first
The free retry calculator computes a full delay schedule from a strategy and an attempt count, so you can see exactly how long a policy keeps trying before you commit to it. No account needed.
Stop Losing Events to Temporary Failures
Pick a backoff strategy, set an attempt limit, and let Hookbase handle the rest — with a Dead Letter Queue behind it for whatever still doesn't make it. Get started free — no credit card required.