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Connect Clerk to Brew so user, organization, billing, and waitlist events fire automations. Send a welcome email when someone signs up, drip a dunning sequence when a subscription goes past due, kick off a workspace-onboarding flow when a new team gets created.

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What You Can Do

  • Trigger automations from Clerk events. Kick off email flows when users sign up, orgs are created, subscriptions go past due, or waitlist entries arrive
  • Auto-sync contacts into your audience. Every Clerk event upserts the user into Brew with clerk_* custom fields (clerk_user_id, clerk_subscription_status, clerk_plan_name, …) you can filter and segment on
  • Personalize with auth context. Reference firstName, lastName, planName, organizationName, and other Clerk fields inside emails
  • Cover lifecycle + billing in one place. Onboarding, dunning, win-back, and waitlist nurture all use the same Clerk connection
Every marketing recipient must have opted in to hear from you. Importing or syncing contact data into Brew is not permission to email it. See What You Can Send.

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How It Works

  1. Brew mints a unique webhook URL for your brand and you paste it into your Clerk Dashboard.
  2. Clerk signs every webhook with your endpoint’s signing secret. Brew verifies the signature via the Standard Webhooks (Svix) spec on receipt, tampered or replayed events are rejected.
  3. For each verified event Brew (a) starts every Live automation whose trigger matches and (b) upserts the Clerk user into your audience with clerk_* custom fields.
See How event triggers work for the conceptual flow shared by every event-source integration.

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Setup

1

Generate your Brew webhook URL

In Brew, open Integrations, click the Clerk card, and click Generate URL. Copy the URL Brew generates for the next step.
2

Add an endpoint in Clerk

Open dashboard.clerk.com, go to Webhooks → + Add Endpoint, and paste the Brew URL into the Endpoint URL field.
3

Subscribe to the events Brew supports

Enable the user, organization, organizationInvitation, organizationMembership, paymentAttempt, subscription, subscriptionItem, and waitlistEntry events (full list below), then click Create.
4

Reveal the Signing Secret

On the endpoint detail page Clerk shows next, click the eye icon next to Signing Secret to reveal it. The value starts with whsec_.
5

Paste the Signing Secret into Brew

Paste the whsec_… secret into the Brew connect form and click Connect. Brew verifies every webhook using the Standard Webhooks (Svix) spec.
6

Verify it's working

Trigger an event in Clerk (e.g. sign up a test user, or send a test invite). Within a few seconds it should appear in the Manage → Recent events panel of the Clerk integration page in Brew. If it doesn’t, recheck the signing secret in step 5.
Brew only listens for Clerk events. It can’t modify users, create organizations, or charge subscriptions.

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Triggering Automations

Once connected, every Clerk event below is provisioned automatically and available as a trigger in the automation builder. The Manage tab on the Clerk integration page is a read-only catalogue of the events Brew is listening for plus a live Recent events stream, no per-event enable step. Whether an event actually fires emails is controlled by whether the bound automation is Live (not Draft).

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Supported Events

Brew supports the following 13 Clerk events as automation triggers: User
  • user.created
Organization
  • organization.created
  • organizationInvitation.created
  • organizationInvitation.accepted
  • organizationInvitation.revoked
  • organizationMembership.created
Billing
  • paymentAttempt.created
  • subscription.created
  • subscriptionItem.freeTrialEnding
  • subscriptionItem.pastDue
  • subscriptionItem.canceled
  • subscriptionItem.abandoned
Waitlist
  • waitlistEntry.created
In chat, say “Send this email when someone signs up via Clerk” and Brew will scaffold the automation with user.created pre-selected.

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Common Patterns

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Personalization

These resolve as merge tags in the email body, subject line, and preview text. Use a fallback wherever an empty value would read badly, like {{ firstName | there }}. Use Clerk payload fields anywhere in your emails. Common variables:
Only firstName, lastName, and createdAt are available on every Clerk event. The rest are event-specific: a tag referenced on an event that doesn’t carry it renders its fallback ({{ planName | your plan }}), so always give event-specific tags one.
Prefer grandTotalFormatted over planAmount in user-facing copy. It ships pre-formatted with the right currency symbol and decimals.
Clerk organization events (like organization.created) don’t carry a customer email. Brew emits a synthetic placeholder so you can still route the event internally, and the event carries name, slug, membersCount, and maxAllowedMemberships for the org itself. To email a real person about a new workspace, trigger on organizationMembership.created instead: it carries the member’s own email alongside organizationName and roleName.

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Troubleshooting

Open the canvas and confirm at least one automation bound to this event is set to Live (not Draft). The Brew integration’s Manage → Recent events panel shows every webhook Clerk has delivered, if the event isn’t there, the webhook isn’t arriving (check Clerk’s endpoint settings and re-paste the signing secret). If the event is there but no email sent, the only remaining gate is automation.published.
The signing secret in Brew doesn’t match the one in Clerk’s Dashboard, usually because it was rotated in one place but not the other. Reveal the current secret on the Clerk endpoint detail page and re-run setup step 5 in Brew.
Create a Draft automation, run a test send from the email editor, and only publish the automation to Live once you’re happy. The Manage → Recent events panel shows every webhook Clerk has delivered in the last 24 hours so you can verify the trigger is firing the way you expect.

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Requirements

  • A Clerk account on any paid plan (free instances support webhooks too)
  • Admin access to your Clerk Dashboard so you can add a Webhook endpoint and reveal the Signing Secret

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Need Help?

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