Stop Pasting Webhooks Into Strangers' Services — Self-Host Your Request Inspector
The Problem With Free Webhook Testers
We've all done it. A Stripe webhook isn't firing. A GitHub notification isn't arriving. You open that public webhook testing site, click "Create a URL," and paste it into your third-party dashboard.
Then the requests start flowing through — to someone else's server. Your payloads, your API keys, your customer data — all of it logged in a database you don't control, on infrastructure you've never seen.
For local development? That's one thing. But for anything resembling production, staging, or even pre-production with real data, you're making a security trade-off you probably haven't thought about.
What You're Actually Leaking
Consider what a webhook payload typically contains:
- Authentication tokens — Many services pass API keys or bearer tokens
- Customer PII — Payment processor webhooks include names, emails, billing addresses
- Internal URLs — Callback URLs, redirect URIs, internal service endpoints
- Session data — User IDs, session tokens, internal identifiers
Self-hosting a request inspector like reqdump flips the security model entirely — your data stays on your infrastructure, the code is fully auditable (~500 lines), and you control retention.