Cloudflare stops reCaptcha because Google makes it a paid service

Cloudflare is moving away from using reCaptcha and using hCaptcha instead. One of the reasons is that Google Cloudflare announced at the beginning of this year that the company will have to pay for the use of reCaptcha.

The CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, emphasizes that Google has every right to make reCaptcha a paid service and that this is also rational, given the large volume and therefore costs that Cloudflare provides. However, the company is still looking for an alternative instead of paying. “For us, it would add millions of dollars in annual costs if our free users continued to use reCaptcha,” Prince reported.

He also writes that Cloudflare has been toying with the idea of ​​stopping Google’s service for some time because of privacy concerns and the fact that Google is blocked in China. However, the company was hesitant to switch to a new service.

That alternative has now been chosen in the form of hCaptcha, which would offer comparable performance. The advantages of this service, according to Cloudflare, are that the company behind hCaptcha does not sell personal data, supports Privacy Pass and is not blocked in China. The company makes money from companies that want image classification data and pays for services that put hCaptcha on their site.

Cloudflare chooses to pay for hCaptcha anyway so that that service can scale up. Cloudflare also deploys its Workers platform for the service, reducing costs for hCaptcha. “That created some additional costs, but they are a fraction of what reCaptcha would cost.”

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart and is intended to prevent input by bots. ReCaptcha started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, but Google took over the project in 2009.