Show HN: Webhooks for platforms that do not natively support them

[subomi]

Hello HN,

We’d like to show you our project — Nohooks[0]. The aim is to add webhooks to platforms that do not natively support webhooks. We really believe many APIs can provide a better developer experience by providing webhook notifications to enable us to automate more things.

Nohooks works by intelligently polling the integrated platform's APIs, determining if a change has occurred, and generating webhook events. Nohooks currently supports webhooks from Notion’s Databases, Render’s Services & Deployments, and DigitalOcean’s Droplets. We will add more in the coming days and improve the types of events/payloads generated to enable new workflows that were previously impossible or difficult to achieve. It uses Convoy[1] to power its webhooks delivery and debugging dashboard.

We welcome you to try it out and give us your feedback — what platform would you love to have webhooks for that doesn’t currently exist? What webhooks best practices would you like to see implemented?

[0]https://nohooks.io

[1]https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy

[ctrlaltdylan]

Pipedream has a similar paradigm, and Notion support as well.

https://pipedream.com/apps/notion

You can write your own "Sources" that can poll any API, it even includes deduping for free: https://pipedream.com/docs/components.

I build custom sources all of the time for scraping RSS feeds, WooCommerce stores, and then triggering low code workflows as if they are webhooks.

[Studywithdidi]

And Pipedream supports Svix[1] which means it has a top notch webhooks experience.

1: https://pipedream.com/apps/svix

[isuckatcoding]

Cool idea. What happens when these services do start offering webhooks?

What does “intelligently” polling mean?

You’d basically have to poll on some schedule (ideally configured by the user).

[subomi]

Our goal is to increase the support of webhooks on the internet as much as possible. If they begin supporting webhooks, that'll be super cool. Hopefully, they use Convoy [0] :)

The intelligent aspect is working around rate limits.

[0] https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy

[subomi]

Update: Nohooks Backend is now open source [0]. The goal is to collectively improve the polling system as well as generate more useful event types/payloads.

It was written in Rails :D

[0] https://github.com/frain-dev/nohooks-backend

[rubenfiszel]

That's super cool and this looks more like a POC than a product for now, but if this were to take off, it would complement really well what we do in our own OSS project windmill.dev [1] where users can deploy scripts in typescript/python/go/bash and more complex flows composed out of those same scripts, get a webhook and a UI to trigger them. Users currently have to either set a schedule to regularly poll or setup a webhook on the event source. This would be a consolidated way for them to have all their event sources in the same place.

[1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

[subomi]

Definitely, I'd love to see this happen. There are a whole lot of events we can generate from DigitalOcean Resources - K8s resources, firewalls, block storage etc.

[EGreg]

Ever heard of HTTP error 429?

We got it from providers where our clients sent too many requests

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/429

[subomi]

Most providers allow enough requests to make this work. E.g. Render supports 400 requests/minute for GET requests. It's enough to make this work. :)

[klntsky]

It's unbelievable that Notion DB does not have webhooks.

And still, your business model depends on these platforms not having features, so your market can be easily captured by them as soon as you grow big enough to be noticed.

[subomi]

Yup. Even DigitalOcean still doesn't have webhooks despite several user requests see here [0]

My business is building a Webhooks Gateway for delivering webhooks at scale - Convoy [1]. We use Convoy Cloud to power Nohooks. The goal is to show what's possible with Convoy so more providers can easily provide webhooks.

[0] https://github.com/digitalocean/api-v2/issues/14

[1] https://github.com/frain-dev/convoy

[Traubenfuchs]

I still didn't find an explanation of what's the difference between callbacks with self service user maintainable HTTP url targets and what is now called webhooks. Can anyone here please elucidate?

[subomi]

What you described seems to me like webhooks. :) Webhooks aren't anything new really, Jeff Lindsay [0] coined them way back in 2007 while at Twilio but they aren't well understood and implemented today.

[0] https://twitter.com/progrium

[rajasimon]

I own NotionWebhook.com and I have not deployed my service yet which offers exactly the same. you can DM me here https://twitter.com/rajasimon to get access.

[jmholla]

What is your data and privacy policy? I'm a bit concerned not seeing anything when accessing such sensitive information. This is a non-starter for me.

Even if that was the case, the only authentication being through Google is another absolute blocker for me to using your service.

Also, your documentation loads extremely slows for me especially a single, static page of docs. That's clearly Notion's fault but isn't a great look.

I like the idea, but this definitely feels like it needs a lot of polish and feels more like a proof of concept than an actual product.

[superzamp]

> feels more like a proof of concept than an actual product

I don't think OP ever touted it as an actual product:

> We’d like to show you our project [...]

This may be personal but I'd love HN and especially Show HN to be one of the last places compatible with bleeding edge demos, where creators can feel confortable to share their pet projects no matter how naive or not-(-so-)prod-ready.

Otherwise I'm afraid we'll only get to deserve ProductHunt-style Show HNs, with tightly knit PR replacing substance and foolishness.

[subomi]

Hm. We hacked Nohooks pretty quickly off Convoy. Google auth & Notion docs were the fastest way to get auth and docs working, respectively.

We'll upload a data and privacy policy soon. :)