Overview

Webhook subscriptions help you follow the events in your application triggered with every POST request. Create, list, update, or remove them from your application using the Dwolla API.

Webhook subscriptions

Create a webhook subscription to receive POST requests from Dwolla (called webhooks) when events associated with your application occur. Webhooks are sent to a URL which you provide when creating a webhook subscription. While we see most applications maintain one webhook subscription, you can have up to ten active webhook subscriptions in Sandbox, and up to five in Production at a time. Refer to the events section for the complete list of events that trigger webhooks. To view example payloads for Customer related events, refer to the Webhooks Events resource within the Developer Docs.

Automatic pause of a webhook subscription

Dwolla will automatically pause subscribed webhook endpoints that are no longer reachable. The webhook subscription will be paused after 400 consecutive failures and 24 hours since the last success. This will help us ensure that unavailable endpoints don’t cause delays or issues in delivery of notifications for other API customers. Webhook subscriptions can be unpaused by calling this endpoint.

Acknowledgement and retries

When your application receives a webhook, it should respond with a HTTP 2xx status code to indicate successful receipt. If Dwolla receives a status code greater than or equal to 3xx, or your application fails to respond within 10 seconds of the attempt, another attempt will be made. Dwolla will not follow redirects and will treat them as a failure.

Dwolla will re-attempt delivery 8 times over the course of 72 hours according to the backoff schedule below. If a webhook was successfully received but you would like the information again, you can call retrieve a webhook by its Id.

Delivery rate

Webhooks are delivered in near real-time as events tied to your application are created. If there is a large number of events created for your application within a short timeframe, Dwolla may deliver bursts of 10 concurrent webhook requests to your subscribed URL. We encourage applications to make their webhook handler do as little as possible and only perform a high level validation of the request. Once initial validation is performed, immediately acknowledge the webhook request and process it in the background later. If your subscribed webhook URL is unable to handle the volume of concurrent requests, please contact Dwolla developer support and the delivery rate can be adjusted.

Retry number	Interval (relative to last retry)	Interval (relative to original attempt)
1	15 min	15 min
2	45 min	1 h
3	2 h	3 h
4	3 h	6 h
5	6 h	12 h
6	12 h	24 h
7	24 h	48 h
8	24 h	72 h

Webhook subscription resource

Parameter	Description
id	Webhook subscription unique identifier.
url	Subscribed url where Dwolla should deliver the webhook notification.
paused	A boolean true or false value indicating if the webhook subscription is paused. A webhook subscription will be automatically paused after 400 consecutive failures. In addition, a subscription can be paused or unpaused by calling this endpoint in the API.
created	ISO-8601 timestamp