Show HN: webhooked.email (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: webhooked.email (2023)

Hey HN,

I built this tool a while ago, and it looks like it's finally getting some traction lately -- wanted to post it up again here for anyone who's looking for a dead simple solution for webhooks that email you.

For those who say new products are hard to trust ("you never know how long they'll be around!") -- this one has been casually running for just over 13 months now!

https://webhooked.email

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I think this is a good idea. I can see many uses, but I believe the free tier is a bit restricted (32 emails per month).

You can set up a Catch Webhook [1] + Outgoing Email [2] automation in Zapier and it gives you 5 emails/day for free. Admittedly it is more complicated than using this, though.

[1] https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496288690317-Trig...

[2] https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496305915917-Send...

I'm no Zapier user, but I think you need a Professional account (€18.73/mo) to use webhooks.

https://zapier.com/pricing

Ah, I stand corrected. I only checked out email sending limits as I didn't think incoming webhooks would be a premium feature!

Looks like I have some room to raise prices! $12/year is nothing in comparison :)

Guess it's time to write a blog post about how I'm 10x cheaper than Zapier and 1,000 times easier to set up!

Ah thanks for this feedback -- 5 emails/day is pretty good, but I was hoping the service was so cheap that people would just... upgrade and call it a day.

I wonder if there's anything I could do to improve the service that would make it a no-brainer. Clearly it's not a no-brainer yet!

This should be popular with the static website crowd, e.g. you can have a personal portfolio hosted on Github Pages, but then add a simple contact form using this. That way you can keep the rest simple if you don't need more, no need to manage a server etc.

There are already plenty of services that do this though, eg formspree.

There absolutely are, and I'm super happy if people use them :)

Gotta admit this was 100% more to scratch my own itch than anything -- I'm pretty sure I built it in a weekend (plus a little bit probably :) and haven't touched it since!

Fair enough, I was wondering whether I was missing something out. How many users do you have at the moment?

Unless I'm mistaken, Formspree doesn't have a free production tier, they only offer free setups for dev/test. The submission above does have an ad supported free tier, so that's already something. Case in point, my own website gets maybe one contact form submission a month, so it wouldn't really be worth paying a monthly subscription to keep that bit alive if I didn't have a server already.

Formspree has a free plan, 50 subs/month: https://formspree.io/plans . No ads either.

I'm in a similar situation, a site with one form submission a month (https://ukcompanydatabase.com) , and it works like a charm.

That page specifically says the free plan is for development and testing only. Not much point in setting up a form when it might get silently g-lined at any point for ToS violations.

Oh, yes you're right, I never read that properly, how odd. Well, it's been working fine and I can't be bothered but I'll keep this service in mind. Thanks!

If someone needs it the other way around, as n OSS, selfhostable service that makes email addresses to webhooks, RSS feeds and JSON API then this might be interesting too: https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/opentrashmail

This is a sick project -- sorry I'm so late getting to this, it's fireworks season in this part of the world and I almost forgot I made this post, haha.

I'd love to operate opentrashmail as a service along with webhooked -- if you don't mind getting in touch my email is in profile :)

It would be nice to have an inverse. Aka send an email if this webhook has not been triggered in the last 24 hours (or some other suitable time)

There are services for this, search "cron job monitoring" or "heartbeat monitoring".

I wrote a system that allows that kinda thing, you'd fire a message saying "Hey alert me if you don't hear again in the next five minutes". This kinda heartbeat can be submitted via cron from servers, etc.

Alerts can then be fired if deadlines are missed, and you can submit your own id/title/timeout period. If you wanted it to route alerts you'd just say "raise the alert now" rather than "+5m", or whatever.

https://github.com/skx/purppura

Development kinda stopped, but the system worked and had a flexible notification system - so you could email, use pushover, etc, etc - as well as a HTTP user interface so you can view pending/raised alerts.

Related, and linked in my repo, is the similar tool Nanny which has more native integrations but the same basic idea:

https://github.com/lunemec/nanny/

I use https://healthchecks.io [1] to track backup tasks and alert if they haven't run in X days. With one cURL command at the start and one at the end, I also get alerts immediately if it fails, and can track duration.

[1] recently featured on the front page because it's a one-man company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41104293

I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net 17 years ago, and it's still running. It's for people, though, not machines. For machines I use healthchecks.io, and there's also Dead Man's Snitch.

Thank you for this feature request! Will implement and get back to you -- if you want to send me an email I'll tell you directly, or I'll just make another response on this comment!

"Alerts" is a great feature.

I want a webhooked Telegram / pusher bot. Email has a 2-3 second delay which is annoying for my deployment notifications.

I used to run a telegram webhook for myself and kept telling myself to make it in a service. You can deduce by the fact that I'm not sending you a link that it hasn't happened yet

Feature request received!

Pusher as in this thing -- https://pusher.com/ right?

Any other places you want to push to? Slack?

Sorry I meant Pushover not Pusher. https://pushover.net/

Pushover is supposedly dead simple to use, but I've been lazy to integrate it and download the apps for my system, setup the dashboard, deploy the endpoint to handle the webhook, etc.

I want a dead simple webhook to phone notification system, and I would use it in a lot of places.

Ah thanks for clarifying this! I definitely didn't realize this is what you meant!

So what you need is a way to put in your pushover API endpoint so we can send to that instead of email.

To actually be able to do configuration and stuff... I need to build a way for people to actually log in to webhooked.email and change stuff -- looks like I need to put some more effort into webhooked in the short term.

Can get an email if a bad guy goes in my honeypot

YUP :) this is a great use case.

you should show an example of what the email looks like

This is a great idea, can't believe I didn't put in something like this.

Will update the landing page

I've been using http://web3forms.com for a while now, works well, but for privacy reasons and GDPR compliance I'm thinking to self-host my own PHP file that simply calls Amazon SES.

Check out Val Town[0] for another way of setting up these kind of email webhooks!

[0] https://val.town

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