Docs/Security/Zero retention and fail-open

Zero retention and fail-open

How Gated avoids storing raw user messages on disk while keeping your application available with a 400ms fail-open timeout.

3 min readLast updated Oct 25, 2026View as Markdown

No Raw Prompt Storage

Gated is designed so your customers' private messages are never saved to a database:

In-Memory Check Only: User message text is checked in memory in a fraction of a millisecond and immediately discarded.
No Prompt Text in Databases or Logs: Only summary counts, abuse categories, token estimates, and a one-way hash of the user ID (user_hash) are saved for your console charts.

A security check should never slow down or break your main application:

400ms Client Timeout: The code snippet uses a 400ms timeout and lets the request proceed normally if the network cannot reach the gate.
Graceful Handling When Trial Limits Are Reached: If a free Starter account uses all 250 checks, POST /v1/check still returns HTTP 200 with allow: true, protection_active: false, quota_exceeded: true so your app keeps working while your console records the unscreened traffic.