Comparison
ShellOrbit vs Hook0
Hook0 is built so that your product can offer webhooks to its users, the same job Svix does, with a source available licence and European hosting. ShellOrbit is built for the other direction. Where they do overlap, Hook0 gives you far more volume per euro and ShellOrbit gives you a much larger free tier and a lower entry price.
Choose Hook0 when
You are giving your own users webhooks, you want to self host, you want an EU company billing you in euro, or your volume is high enough that the daily allowances pay for themselves.
Choose ShellOrbit when
You are receiving webhooks rather than providing them, you want a free tier you can actually build on, or you want a first paid plan at $15.
| What is being compared | ShellOrbit | Hook0 |
|---|---|---|
| The problem it solves | Receiving webhooks that other services send to you. | Delivering webhooks from your product to your own users. |
| Licence | Closed source. Hosted only. | Advantage Hook0. Source available under SSPL-1.0. Self hosting is free. SSPL is not an OSI approved open source licence, but the source is readable and self hosting is permitted. |
| Free cloud tier | Advantage ShellOrbit. 15,000 events a month, 3 day retention. | 100 events a day, roughly 3,000 a month, 7 day retention. |
| First paid plan, price | Advantage ShellOrbit. $15 a month. | 59 euro a month. |
| First paid plan, volume | 75,000 events a month. | Advantage Hook0. 30,000 events a day, roughly 900,000 a month. Around twelve times our volume for around four times our price. On raw throughput they are much better value. |
| First paid plan, retention | 14 days. | 14 days. |
| Price of extra events | Advantage ShellOrbit. $0.50 per 1,000 on the $15 plan, falling to $0.30. Their overage is expensive, but their allowances are large enough that most users will never reach it. | 0.003 euro per event on Startup, which is 3 euro per 1,000. |
| Self hosting | Not available. | Advantage Hook0. Free, unlimited events, or a supported tier at 500 euro a month. |
| Fit for inbound receiving | Advantage ShellOrbit. The whole product is shaped around it. | Possible, but the product is documented and designed for the other direction. |
| Uptime commitment | Advantage ShellOrbit. 99.9 percent monthly on the $99 plan, in the terms. | Not published on the pricing page. |
| Where you are billed from | Billed in US dollars. | European, billed in euro. A real advantage if EU invoicing or data residency is a procurement requirement. |
Where Hook0 is genuinely better
Throughput per euro. Their 59 euro plan allows 30,000 events a day. Ours allows 75,000 a month for $15. Per event, Hook0 is roughly three times cheaper on that comparison, and the gap grows on their Pro tier. If you have real volume and you can live with the direction mismatch, the arithmetic favours them.
You can run it yourself. Self hosting is free and unlimited, which no hosted product can match on price.
European by default. Billed in euro by a European company. If your legal team has an opinion about where the invoice and the data come from, that is a requirement, not a preference.
Where ShellOrbit is genuinely better
A free tier you can build on. 100 events a day is a demonstration allowance. 15,000 a month is enough to run a small application in production, and events beyond the allowance are billed rather than dropped. Hook0’s free tier blocks extra events outright.
The direction actually matches. Hook0’s documentation, model and dashboard are built around the idea that you own the events and your users subscribe to them. Using it to receive Stripe’s webhooks means working against the grain of the product.
Daily caps against monthly allowances. Hook0 counts per day. A quiet month with one busy afternoon can breach a daily cap while sitting comfortably inside a monthly one. Which shape suits you depends on your traffic, but spiky inbound traffic is the normal case for webhooks, and that is the case a monthly allowance handles better.
Try it on your own webhooks
Free for 15,000 events a month, no card. Paid plans start at $15.