Hookdeck and PayHook answer different questions. Hookdeck is an event gateway for webhooks from any service: it receives them at a stable URL, queues and retries their delivery to your app, forwards them to localhost through its CLI, and lets you inspect and replay them, on a free plan to start. PayHook is a webhook inspector for payments only, from Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Dodo Payments: it checks each signature and says why it failed, follows each subscription's events, and tells you whether a paying customer should have access.
If you need delivery you can rely on, that is Hookdeck. If you need to know why a paid customer is locked out, that is what PayHook is for. PayHook is also much younger: it is in closed beta, and this page says plainly what it does not do yet.
Side by side
| What | Hookdeck | PayHook |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An event gateway for webhooks and events from any service | A webhook inspector for payment providers |
| Providers | More than 180 source types, Stripe, Paddle and Polar among them, plus generic HMAC, basic auth and API key checks | Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Dodo Payments |
| A signature that fails | The request is rejected with the cause VERIFICATION_FAILED, and can be retried once the verification is fixed | The event is stored with its verdict and a reason: a missing or malformed header, an unusable secret, a signature that does not match, or one that matches outside the time window |
| Delivery to your app | A queue with automatic retries, up to 50 per event, manual and bulk retries, filters, transformations and throughput limits | In the beta, PayHook gets a copy: you add it as a second endpoint at your provider. Relaying events to your app, with retries, comes after the beta |
| Localhost | The Hookdeck CLI, free, and the Console, which needs no account | Not yet: a payhook listen command is planned |
| When something fails | Issues open automatically, with notifications | Each subscription's events are followed as one chain, with a verdict on whether access should be on and what is missing, for Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Dodo |
| For your coding agent | Guides and agent skills for many of its source types | A fix prompt to paste into Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable or Bolt; plain-language explanations and an MCP server are planned |
| Free | The Developer plan: 10,000 events a month, 3 days of retention, one user | The closed beta, by invitation from the waitlist |
| Paid | Team from $39 a month, Growth from $499 a month | Pricing comes at launch |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR and CCPA on every plan, HIPAA on Growth | Nothing to claim yet |
When Hookdeck is the right tool
- Events must keep flowing while your app is down: a queue, retries and throughput limits.
- You receive webhooks from many services, not only payments.
- You develop against localhost and want one stable URL instead of a new tunnel URL after every restart.
- You need a team, an SLA, single sign-on or a compliance report.
When PayHook helps
- A customer paid and your app did not unlock, and the logs say nothing useful. Which event to trust, provider by provider, is on payment succeeded, subscription not active.
- Every event fails verification and the provider's error does not say why: Stripe, Paddle and Polar each give one message for several causes.
- You build on Lovable or Bolt, with no localhost and an AI that writes the handler: the fix prompt goes straight into its chat.
- You want to see which events your provider sent for a checkout, a trial or a cancellation, and which one your code never handled.
Using both
They do not exclude each other. In the beta, PayHook is one more endpoint at your payment provider, with its own secret: the provider keeps delivering each event to Hookdeck, or straight to your app, as before, and sends PayHook a copy. Your delivery does not depend on PayHook, and PayHook sees exactly what the provider sent.
What PayHook does not do yet
- Relay events to your app, and replay them re-signed with your secret: both come after the beta.
- Forward events to localhost.
- Explain events in plain language, or answer your coding agent through an MCP server.
- Alert you when a payment does not activate.
- Diagnose Paddle's subscription chains: its signatures are checked, its sequences not yet.
PayHook is in closed beta; the home page has the details.
Sources
- Hookdeck documentation, Event Gateway pricing, Sources, Authentication, Requests, Retries, Issues and notifications, CLI and Console, checked on 9 October 2026.
- PayHook: what the closed beta does as of 9 October 2026.