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The Hellgate Cloud Platform follows two distinct usage patterns: composing services yourself or using Commerce, which is already composed for you.

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Composable Services

The platform’s individual services each do one thing well and are designed to slot into any payment stack. You pick the ones you need and compose them yourself.

Guardian

PCI-compliant tokenization vault. Stores card data, manages PCI tokens, network tokens, and generic tokens. The compliance layer underneath any payment stack.

Specter

Real-time fraud intelligence. Scores every transaction as it passes through your payment flow.

Link

PSP abstraction layer. One integration, access to acquirers and payment service providers globally.

Hub

Coming SoonOrchestration fabric. Routes payment flows between acquirers, PSPs, and fraud tools with intelligent routing and automatic retries.
Each service is standalone and built for composability.

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Commerce: The Composed Product

Commerce is a complete and opinionated payment orchestration service built by composing our platform’s own services. It provides ready-made implementations of the capabilities most payment businesses need:
  • Payments — CIT, MIT, and the payment lifecycle management
  • Authentications — 3-D Secure and FIDO (Passkeys)
  • Ecosystem enablement — marketplace and partner network operating models
Under the hood, Commerce routes through Hub to Guardian (tokenization), Link (PSP connectivity), and Specter (fraud intelligence) — the same services that will be made available to you as standalone components.
Diagram showing Commerce routing through Hub to composed services: Specter for risk, Link for payment service providers, and Guardian for card schemes
This means Commerce is not a walled garden. It is a production-proven composition of the same building blocks you have access to. If you ever want to build your own stack, the components are already there.

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Progressive Enhancement: BYOG

Even when using Commerce, you can still exercise composability. By default, Hellgate manages a Guardian instance for sensitive data stored in your Commerce account. If you already operate a Guardian instance yourself, you can connect it instead. This is called Bring Your Own Guardian (BYOG). Commerce continues to handle payments, authentications, and ecosystem operations — the Guardian component is simply replaced with yours. BYOG lets you:
  • Reuse existing tokens — tokens are accessible in both services
  • Control the token store — card data stays in the Guardian instance you own
  • Bridge both patterns — operate Guardian standalone and Commerce against the same underlying data
BYOG is configured at the Commerce account level. Contact our support to set it up.

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Choosing Your Approach

Choose individual services when you want to build custom payment orchestration and need specific components — a compliance layer, a fraud engine, a PSP connector — without adopting a pre-built product.Start with Guardian for PCI tokenization, the most commonly needed component. Additional services are releasing progressively.