webhook.co vs RequestBin
RequestBin is the tool a lot of us learned webhooks on. The thing at that name today is a different product with a different deal, and the difference is worth knowing before you send it anything.
Claims about RequestBin verified against their own documentation on . Sources below.
webhook.co is pre-launch. Our prices and retention windows below are published, not yet purchasable.
Why people compare these two
There is a good chance you got here by typing a URL from memory. You go to requestb.in, expect a bin, and get a signup form instead. Nothing is broken — the redirect works exactly as intended — but the property that made RequestBin worth remembering, that you could get a URL without an account or a decision, is not part of the deal any more.
This comparison is mostly a history lesson, because the honest answer to which is better depends on which RequestBin you mean. The original was Jeff Lindsay's HTTP inspector; Runscope took over the project and the hosted instance in August 2013, promising then to keep it free and to continue offering it without any registration requirements. That hosted instance was discontinued in March 2018 — Runscope said publicly it was because of ongoing abuse that made the site hard to keep up reliably — and the open-source repository is no longer on GitHub. Today both requestbin.com and the original requestb.in redirect to Pipedream, where RequestBin is the front door to a workflow platform and creating a bin requires an account. That is a perfectly reasonable product. It is not the one the muscle memory is for.
At a glance
| Capability | RequestBin | webhook.co |
|---|---|---|
| Create a bin without an account | No — signup is required | No account needed in the sandbox; an endpoint needs one |
| Captured event retention on the free plan | 7 days | 7 days |
| Free plan allowance | 100 credits/month, 3 active workflows | 5,000 captured events, once, then capture pauses |
| Ingest rate before throttling | About 10 requests/second, then 429 | Not published as a per-second cap |
| Built-in provider signature verification | No — a static token or OAuth; HMAC is yours to write | 141 providers, Apache-2.0 |
| Billing unit | Credits, metered on compute time and memory | Captured events |
| The original hosted requestb.in | Discontinued in March 2018; the domain now redirects | Not applicable |
What you get at that URL today
A capable workflow builder with a request bin at the entrance. You sign up, you get a durable endpoint on their domain (custom domains are supported), and captured requests can trigger steps written in Node, Python, Go or Bash, or one of a few thousand pre-built connectors. It will catch payloads far larger than most inspectors will look at. Billing is in credits rather than requests, and their free plan is a hundred credits a month with captured events kept for seven days and an average ingest rate of around ten requests a second before you start seeing 429s. If what you wanted was a bin, that is a lot of platform in the way; if what you wanted was a bin that then does something, it is the best answer on this page.
Signature verification is code you write
This one is a verified absence rather than an inference. Pipedream's own trigger documentation says HTTP triggers are public by default and require no authorization to invoke, and that they support two built-in authorization types: a static custom token, and OAuth. Neither of those is a provider signature check. So verifying that a request genuinely came from Stripe or GitHub means writing the HMAC comparison yourself in a workflow step, per source, and keeping it right as providers rotate schemes. We ship that for 141 providers as Apache-2.0 code you can read, and you can check a captured signature in the browser at our verifier without an account.
The no-signup property, and who still has it
Worth being even-handed about, because we do not fully have it either. If your requirement is genuinely a URL in five seconds with no account, the honest recommendations are webhook.site, or our own sandbox, which needs no signup and no install. What an account buys you here is the part the sandbox deliberately does not do: an endpoint that belongs to you, keeps its captures, and can forward them to your machine. We would rather point you at the right free tool than pretend a signup is not a signup.
What Pipedream does better
It is a genuinely strong product and the comparison is not close on breadth. Capturing a request is the beginning rather than the end: you get a real execution environment in four languages, thousands of connectors, and the ability to return a custom response to the caller, which means a bin can stand in for a service you have not written yet. It accepts payloads far larger than we do and supports custom domains on your endpoints, so the URL you hand a partner can carry your own name. Bins and their events are addressable from a REST API and a CLI, so this fits into continuous integration properly. If your next sentence after catching the webhook is and then send it to Slack and a spreadsheet, they have already built that and we have not.
Where we fit instead
When the thing you want is a receiver rather than a workflow: verification you did not write, captures that keep, replay into a port on your laptop, and a bill that counts one thing. And when you would rather the verification path were open source, because a signature check you cannot read is a signature check you are taking on faith.
Moving from RequestBin
Work out which bin you actually have
If you followed a bookmark and ended up signing up, your captures live in a Pipedream workflow rather than in anything called a bin, and you will find them under that workflow's event history. If you never signed up, there is nothing to move and this is a two-minute change.
Repoint the provider, keep the old one running
Add a second endpoint at the provider rather than editing the one in place. Same traffic, two destinations, and no window where a webhook has nowhere to go. Once you have seen a real event arrive on our side, remove the old one.
Anything after the capture has to be rebuilt
This is the honest cost. Workflow steps, connectors and custom responses have no equivalent here — we hand the event to your code or your agent and stop. If your bin had grown into a small integration, moving it means writing that integration somewhere, and you should count that before starting.
Questions about RequestBin and webhook.co
What happened to requestb.in?
Runscope discontinued the publicly hosted instance in March 2018, saying it was due to ongoing abuse that made the site difficult to keep up reliably, and pointed people at self-hosting instead. The open-source repository is no longer on GitHub. Both requestb.in and requestbin.com now redirect to Pipedream's RequestBin page.
Can you still use RequestBin without signing up?
No. Creating a bin on the current RequestBin leads to a Pipedream signup. That is a change from the original hosted service, which Runscope committed in 2013 to continue offering without registration requirements.
Does RequestBin verify webhook signatures?
Not as a built-in per-provider feature. Pipedream's documentation states HTTP triggers are public by default and support two built-in authorization types, a static custom token and OAuth. Checking a provider HMAC signature means writing that comparison yourself in a workflow step.
What is the closest thing to the old RequestBin today?
For a URL with no account at all, webhook.site or our own sandbox are the closest in spirit. For an endpoint that persists and keeps what it catches, you want a receiver with an account behind it, which is what this comparison is about.
Sources, and how to correct us
Every claim above about RequestBin was read off the pages below on the date shown, not from memory. Products change faster than pages do — if something here is wrong or out of date, including if you work at RequestBin, tell us and we'll fix it.
- Pipedream — RequestBin — checked
- Pipedream pricing — checked
- Pipedream docs — workflow limits — checked
- Pipedream docs — HTTP triggers — checked
- Pipedream docs — glossary, credits — checked
- Runscope RequestBin repository, archived March 2018 — checked
Other comparisons
Point a webhook at it. Watch it land.
Start free: a permanent URL, full inspection, one-command replay — and outbound delivery, because every feature is on every plan. Move up when you need more events.