Why Sanebase?
If you’ve ever processed real customer transactions in production, even at a small scale, you already know what a nightmare it is to stay in sync.
Webhooks — icebergs that sink your engineering time
Webhooks look deceptively simple at first. Wire up an endpoint to receive updates and you’re done, right? Not so fast.
In reality, there are so many things that can (and will) go wrong:
Each user operation triggers a cascade of webhooks
A single Stripe subscription update can fire 10+ webhooks across different objects (customer, subscription, invoice, payment method). Your endpoint gets flooded with partial updates.
Webhooks arrive out of order
Stripe webhooks are not ordered, so the last webhook you receive might not contain the current state. Your database ends up with stale data.
Webhook payloads are incomplete
Most webhooks only contain the changed fields, not the complete object state. You’re left piecing together the full picture from multiple events.
Network failures create data inconsistencies
When your server is down or times out, you miss critical updates. Your internal state drifts from the source of truth.
Debugging webhook issues is a nightmare
Failed webhooks, duplicate events, and missing data create support tickets that are hard to trace and fix.
Typical attempts to solve this
Most developers throw a webhook gateway in front of their webhook endpoint and call it a day. This is a common pattern, and it has a few upsides, such as retries, where the gateway will retry failed webhooks. But it once again leaves you with the same issues as before, such as partial updates, out of order events, and more.
Enter Sanebase
Sanebase makes it stupidly simple to keep your app in sync with Stripe.
For example, in our Unified Ingest mode, it acts as an intelligent middleware layer between Stripe and your application. Instead of dealing with raw webhooks, you get clean, consolidated data updates.
Sanebase also has other sync modes which let you ditch webhooks completely.