Do I need a separate service to receive third-party webhooks?

Usually, yes—you need some kind of publicly reachable service/endpoint to receive third-party webhooks.

Why

A webhook is just an HTTP request sent by another service to your app when an event happens. For that to work, your receiver must:

• have a URL the third party can reach
• handle incoming HTTP requests
• verify the webhook if needed
• process the event reliably

What that “service” can be

It doesn’t have to be a separate app in a complex sense. It can be:

• A dedicated webhook endpoint in your existing backend
• A serverless function (AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Netlify functions, etc.)
• A small standalone service just for webhooks
• A queue/ingestion service that receives webhooks and forwards them internally

When you might want a separate service

A separate webhook receiver is useful if:

• your main app isn’t internet-facing
• you want better security isolation
• you need high reliability and retry handling
• you expect lots of webhook traffic
• you want to validate/signature-check and enqueue events before main processing

When you don’t need one

If your existing backend is:

• publicly accessible
• can expose an endpoint
• can process requests quickly
• can handle retries/idempotency

then you can just add a route like:

• POST /webhooks/provider-name

Key requirements

Regardless of architecture, make sure you can:

• return a 2xx quickly to acknowledge receipt
• verify signatures or secrets
• handle duplicate deliveries
• log and retry failed processing

If you want, I can also suggest the best webhook architecture for your stack (Node, Python, serverless, etc.).