Frequently Asked Questions

Anonymily is a webhook relay tool for developers. It gives you a public HTTPS endpoint that captures incoming webhook events and forwards them — in real time — to your local development server. You get full event history, replay, signature verification, and optional AI-powered diagnosis.

ngrok exposes your entire localhost to the internet via a tunnel. Anonymily relays only webhook events — the CLI pulls events from our edge, there is no inbound connection to your machine. This means no firewall rules, no NAT traversal issues, and no risk of your full local server being reachable. We also store events, so you can replay them after the CLI is closed.

No account is needed to get started. npx @anonymilyhq/cli listen 3000 gives you an anonymous endpoint immediately. Create a free account to access the Dashboard and event history. A persistent named endpoint (a stable URL that survives restarts) is a Pro feature.

Yes. The Free tier gives you 200 requests per hook, 48-hour event history, 1 persistent named endpoint, unlimited single replay (within retention), basic custom responses, the real-time SSE stream, and the CLI relay tool. The Pro tier unlocks 2,000 requests per hook, 30-day history, unlimited named endpoints, modify & bulk replay, full custom responses (headers + presets), signature verification, synthetic events, and AI features. A Team plan (10,000 requests/hook, 90-day history, shared endpoints) is coming soon.

Node 18 LTS or later. The CLI is ESM-compatible and has no native dependencies.

Yes: npm install -g @anonymilyhq/cli. But npx works perfectly and installs nothing permanently — useful in CI and onboarding flows.

Pass --id my-endpoint and --token YOUR_PAT. Generate a Personal Access Token from your Account settings. Named endpoints require a Free account; the URL stays the same across every CLI restart.

Either the hook ID doesn't exist yet (first run creates it automatically) or your PAT is incorrect. Check that you're passing the right --token. Run npx @anonymilyhq/cli whoami to verify your token works.

Yes. Pass your token via the ANONYMILY_TOKEN environment variable and the endpoint ID via ANONYMILY_HOOK_ID. The CLI picks these up automatically so you don't need to pass flags.

Free accounts retain events for 48 hours. Pro accounts retain events for 30 days (Team: 90 days). Events older than the retention window are permanently deleted.

Yes. All captured events are stored on our servers for the retention window. Open the Dashboard, find the event, and click Replay. You can also replay from the CLI: npx @anonymilyhq/cli replay <event-id> --port 3000.

All traffic uses TLS 1.3. Stored event bodies are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM). We never log or inspect payload contents outside of the features you explicitly invoke (e.g., AI diagnosis).

Yes. Anonymily responds 200 to the provider as soon as the event is captured, before forwarding to your local server. This prevents provider retry loops. You can configure a custom response status or body per endpoint (Pro feature).

Each Anonymily hook has a stable HMAC secret. When a provider (Stripe, GitHub, etc.) signs its payload, you verify it on your local server using that secret. The CLI forwards the original headers untouched, so your existing verification code works without modification. See the Signature Verification guide.

The most common cause is verifying against parsed JSON instead of the raw request body. Always use the raw buffer/bytes. See the provider-specific examples for the correct pattern per provider.

Anonymily works with any service that can POST to an HTTPS URL. We have dedicated guides and signature verification support for Stripe, GitHub, Shopify, Slack, and Razorpay. For any other provider, just paste the Anonymily URL in their webhook config — it works the same way.

Yes. Set up your Anonymily URL as the destination in the Stripe Dashboard under Developers → Webhooks. Use Stripe's "Send test webhook" button to fire events. They arrive in your CLI and Dashboard instantly.

Pro accounts get: AI diagnosis (explain why an event failed and suggest a fix), handler generation (produce a production-ready handler stub for any captured event), and edge-case event synthesis (generate realistic test payloads for uncommon webhook types).

AI features are powered by Claude (Anthropic). Payloads sent for diagnosis are not used to train models and are processed under Anthropic's API data usage policy.

Install the Anonymily MCP server and wire it into your agent. See the MCP Setup guide for step-by-step instructions.

Pro is billed monthly. You can cancel at any time from Account settings. Payments are processed by Razorpay. After cancellation your account stays on Pro for the remainder of the current billing period, then reverts to Free.

We offer a full refund within 7 days of any charge if you haven't made significant use of Pro features. Contact hello@anonymily.com.

Annual billing with a discount is on our roadmap. Email hello@anonymily.com if you'd like early access or have volume needs.