PSA: Google Charging for reCaptcha. hCaptcha pays you instead!

[ApparentHorizon]

Cloudflare just announced they're switching to hCaptcha.

hCaptcha allows companies to buy data labeling at scale so your visitors train their AI. You then get a cut of that money.

I've always hated the reCaptcha implementation, but it's the best out there. Especially with their v3.

(Except for that sticky badge on the right side. That's like a slap across the face to webmasters. "You're our b* now. You will obtrusively advertise for us whether you like it or not.")

Issue with hCaptcha as far as I can tell is increased customer friction. It's not the standard human verification people are used to. I'm implementing it on a couple of sites, to see how it works.

Anyone have experience with it - on either the labeling or the webmaster side?

 

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[George Appiah]

Before anyone runs out to replace their reCaptcha, let's stop and reflect on the fact that none of us here runs a Cloudflare-scale of infrastructure. As with most of Google's API services (eg Google Maps), there's always going to be a generous free tier that will be more than adequate for most small to medium websites.

And in this case, it appears reCaptcha is free for 1,000 API calls per second or 1 million calls per month.

I'm actually quite surprised that Google never had some sort of clause in their ToS that prevented huge infrastructure companies like Cloudflare from essentially leeching off their backs. Just imagine the load that Cloudflare alone as a single reCaptcha user was sending to Google's servers -- from the millions of their customer sites that have WAF enabled!

 

[ApparentHorizon]

Before anyone runs out to replace their reCaptcha, let's stop and reflect on the fact that none of us here runs a Cloudflare-scale of infrastructure. As with most of Google's API services (eg Google Maps), there's always going to be a generous free tier that will be more than adequate for most small to medium websites.

And in this case, it appears reCaptcha is free for 1,000 API calls per second or 1 million calls per month.

I'm actually quite surprised that Google never had some sort of clause in their ToS that prevented huge infrastructure companies like Cloudflare from essentially leeching off their backs. Just imagine the load that Cloudflare alone as a single reCaptcha user was sending to Google's servers -- from the millions of their customer sites that have WAF enabled!

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That's a good distinction if you run just your website or two.

For the rest, you can make a couple of accounts to get past these limits, or unload them on your clients.

Though I wouldn't be surprised to see them be more aggressive with their payment structure like they've done with their maps API in the past few years.