Self-Hostable Webhook Inspector And Replay Studio With Persistent Local Capture For Indie Devs Who Outgrew smee.io And Refuse The 2026 ngrok And Inlets Price Hikes

dev tool weekend hack •• multiple requests

smee.io bins are ephemeral and don't persist. ngrok's $10 starter (5GB bandwidth) and Inlets's $25/month personal license have priced out hobby and freelance work. webhook.site is hosted, so your customer's webhook payloads end up on a third-party server you can't audit. The gap is a single-binary or Docker-compose package that captures webhook traffic to local disk, exposes a Postman-quality UI to inspect bodies and replay, supports Stripe/GitHub/Twilio signature verification, and runs behind your existing Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale. No accounts, no monthly fee, no third-party seeing your customer data.

builder note

The inspector is the product, not the tunnel. Ship as a single binary that you point at your existing Cloudflare Tunnel or run on localhost. Charge $19 one-time for a license that unlocks team replay sharing... matches the BuyItForLife mood of devs done with monthly tool taxes.

landscape (4 existing solutions)

Tunnels are commodified and free (Cloudflare, Tailscale). What's missing is the polished inspector + replay layer that runs entirely on the dev's machine and persists captures across reboots.

smee.io Free and easy but bins are not persistent, there's no replay UI, and you can't run it locally.

webhook.site Best-in-class inspector UI but hosted. Customer webhook payloads land on a third-party server, which is a non-starter for anyone handling PII or PHI.

ngrok Tunnel-first, inspect-second. The inspect UI is fine but the tunnel pricing ($10-20/mo for hobby use) and bandwidth caps push freelancers off.

Cloudflare Tunnel + manual logging Free tunnel, no inspector. You build the request logger and replay UI yourself. Everyone does. Badly.

sources (3)

other https://dev.to/digital_trubador/10-best-ngrok-alternatives-f... "Services like ThunderHooks capture webhooks and store them for later inspection and replay, instead of tunneling traffic in real-time." 2026-04-08

other https://medium.com/@ibrahimpelumi6142/self-hosted-ngrok-alte... "Self-Hosted Ngrok Alternative in 200 Lines of Node.js." 2026-02-15

other https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling "List of ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale, and ZeroTier alternatives... Focus on self-hosting." 2026-05-01

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