Hyperswitch: An Open Source Payments Switch Built in Rust

If you've ever worked on an app that processes payments, you know the drill. Integrating with a single payment processor is a chore. Integrating with multiple—to offer customers more choice or to route around failures—can become a full-time engineering nightmare. What if there was a way to connect to dozens of providers through a single, unified API? That's the problem Hyperswitch aims to solve.

This open-source payments switch, written in Rust, acts as a smart router between your application and a vast ecosystem of payment processors and methods. It's like Stripe for connectivity, but open and self-hostable, giving developers ultimate control over their payment stack.

What It Does

In simple terms, Hyperswitch is a universal adapter for payment processors. You integrate your application with the Hyperswitch API once. Behind the scenes, it can be configured to connect to numerous payment service providers (PSPs) like Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, and many more. It handles the translation between its own unified API and the unique APIs of each provider.

This means you can add new payment methods and processors without ever touching your core application code again. It also handles intelligent routing, which can be used to maximize for success rates, lower costs, or ensure compliance.

Why It's Cool

Beyond the obvious benefit of a single integration, Hyperswitch has some clever features that make it stand out.

First, it's built in Rust. This isn't just a trendy choice. Payments demand extreme levels of performance, security, and reliability. Rust's memory safety guarantees eliminate entire classes of bugs and vulnerabilities, while its zero-cost abstractions make it incredibly fast. For a critical piece of infrastructure like a payments switch, these are not just nice-to-haves; they're essential.

Second, it's truly open source. You can self-host it, inspect every line of code, and customize it to your heart's content. This is a big deal for businesses that need to comply with specific regulatory requirements or those that simply don't want a critical part of their revenue flow depending on a third-party black box.

Finally, its architecture is built for the real world. It supports features like retries with automatic failover to a backup PSP if the primary one is down, smart routing to maximize successful authorizations, and detailed logging and analytics to help you understand your payment flow.

How to Try It

The quickest way to see Hyperswitch in action is to check out the live demo on the project's website. You can play with a merchant sandbox and see how the dashboard and API calls work.

To get your hands dirty and run it yourself, the GitHub repository is the place to go. You can clone the repo and get it running locally with Docker Compose, which spins up all the necessary services. The docs are thorough and will guide you through configuration and connecting your first test payment processor.

1. Head over to the GitHub repo: github.com/juspay/hyperswitch
2. Check out the README for an overview and the live demo link.
3. Dive into the documentation for setup and configuration guides.

Final Thoughts

Hyperswitch feels like a project that tackles a genuine, painful problem for developers. The decision to build it in Rust shows a serious commitment to performance and security from the ground up. While integrating and managing it yourself is a bigger lift than using a paid, hosted solution, the trade-off is control, flexibility, and transparency.

For a development team building a product where payments are a core feature—especially in fintech or e-commerce—Hyperswitch could be a game-changer. It abstracts away the immense complexity of the global payments landscape and lets you focus on building your product.

— @githubprojects