Comparison
ShellOrbit vs Hook Relay
This is the page where the competitor wins the price argument. Hook Relay does the same job, receiving webhooks with retries, replay and logging, and per event it costs less than ShellOrbit at every paid tier. What ShellOrbit offers instead is a free tier you can run a real application on, monthly allowances rather than daily caps, and commitments published in the terms.
Choose Hook Relay when
You want the lowest cost per event, your traffic is even enough that a daily cap is not a problem, and a three day retry window matters to you.
Choose ShellOrbit when
Your traffic is spiky, you want a free tier you can build on rather than evaluate on, or you want an uptime commitment and a status page you can point a customer at.
| What is being compared | ShellOrbit | Hook Relay |
|---|---|---|
| What the product does | Receives inbound webhooks, retries with backoff, replay and logging. | Receives inbound webhooks, retries with backoff, replay and logging. |
| Free tier, volume | Advantage ShellOrbit. 15,000 events a month. | 100 deliveries a day, roughly 3,000 a month. |
| Free tier, retention | 3 days. | Advantage Hook Relay. 14 days. |
| First paid plan, price | Advantage ShellOrbit. $15 a month. | $30 a month. |
| First paid plan, volume | 75,000 events a month. | Advantage Hook Relay. 10,000 deliveries a day, roughly 300,000 a month. |
| First paid plan, retention | 14 days. | Advantage Hook Relay. 30 days. |
| Cost per 1,000 events at the first paid plan | About $0.20. | Advantage Hook Relay. About $0.10. Roughly half our price per event. This is the honest headline of this page. |
| Next plan up | $40 a month. 150,000 events, 30 day retention. | Advantage Hook Relay. $90 a month. 30,000 a day, roughly 900,000 a month, 90 day retention. |
| How the allowance is counted | Advantage ShellOrbit. Monthly, with overage billed rather than blocked. Webhook traffic arrives in bursts. A monthly allowance absorbs one busy afternoon; a daily cap does not. | Daily. |
| Retry window | Configurable attempts and backoff, up to about a day of tapering retries. | Advantage Hook Relay. Doubling backoff for up to three days. |
| Endpoints | Advantage ShellOrbit. 1 on free, 5 on the $15 plan, unlimited from $40. | 3 on free, 30 on the $30 plan, 90 on the $90 plan. |
| Fan out to several destinations | Advantage ShellOrbit. Up to 3 destinations per endpoint from the $40 plan. | Not published. |
| Payload transformation before forwarding | Advantage ShellOrbit. From the $40 plan. | Not published. |
| Custom domains | From the $40 plan. | On the $90 plan. |
| Uptime commitment | Advantage ShellOrbit. 99.9 percent monthly on the $99 plan, written into the terms. | Not published. |
Where Hook Relay is genuinely better
Price per event. Their $30 plan allows about 300,000 deliveries a month. Ours allows 75,000 for $15. That is roughly half our cost per event, and the gap holds at the tier above. If your evaluation is a spreadsheet with a cost column, they win it.
Retention at every paid tier. 30 days where we give 14, and 90 days where we give 30. Their free tier keeps events for 14 days against our 3.
A three day retry window against our roughly one day. A destination that is down over a long weekend comes back to find its events still waiting.
Where ShellOrbit is genuinely better
Monthly allowances rather than daily caps. This is the difference that actually bites. Webhook traffic is bursty by nature: a quiet month with one release day, one sale, or one backfill from a provider. A daily cap turns that afternoon into dropped or throttled events even though the month as a whole was nowhere near the limit. A monthly allowance absorbs it, and events past the allowance are billed rather than blocked.
A free tier you can run something on. 100 deliveries a day is enough to evaluate a product. 15,000 events a month is enough to run a small application in production, indefinitely, without a card.
Fan out, transformation and unlimited endpoints. From $40, one inbound event can go to three destinations, each with its own retry state, and the payload can be reshaped on the way through. Hook Relay’s pricing page does not list either feature, and it counts endpoints rather than leaving them unlimited.
Published commitments. A 99.9 percent monthly uptime target in the terms of service, and a status page running live checks with incident history. Useful when a customer of yours asks what happens if this breaks.
The honest summary
If cost per event is the deciding number, Hook Relay is cheaper and we would rather you knew that here than worked it out yourself. If your traffic is spiky, if you want fan out or transformation, or if you need something contractual to point at, that is where ShellOrbit earns the difference.
Try it on your own webhooks
Free for 15,000 events a month, no card. Paid plans start at $15.