Update: April 1st, 8:05pm Eastern 2024. It appears like Google began to slowly roll out the promised price hikes, see new pricing here. The pricing hikes are in fact real.
Update: This is Apr 1st 6am Easter, 2024 – I do not see any documentation updates or other confirmations from google official sources that this is indeed happening. It would be great if google could come out with an official clarification on the matter. Was the pricing update delayed?
reCAPTCHA is service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a turing test to tell human and bots apart. Previously almost free for most sites – the pricing is about to be significantly altered come April 1st 2024.
While previously enojoying the high free tier limits of 1mln free assessments per month – which translated to almost universal installation on millions of websites, this appears to be about to change starting April 1st 2024.
According to the email I got this morning: Google reduces the free assessments from 1mln to just 10000 a month for both recaptcha enterprise service and previously “free recaptcha service”, which constitutes a 100x allowance reduction, renames recapcha no-cost plan to reCAPTCHA-lite (with up to 10000 assessments a month) and introduces new “reCAPTCHA standard” plan – that comes with up to 100000 assessments for 8$ a month.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise users are still going to be paying 1$ per every 1000 assessments after the first free 10000 assessments (also reduced from previously 1mln free per month). But, and email is a little confusing here, it would appear that the “transaction protection” feature becomes less expensive if you use it: (from $40 per 1000 to $1 per 1000 reduction).
Being a core service for many websites – the upcoming reCAPTCHA Pricing Change is going to send many developers and companies scrambling for alternatives and assessing the current usage, although the 8$ per 100k assessments per month plan might be enough for many.
Just got this email this morning:
How incredibly poor this looks for them, hacking your entry level plan to nothing then charging for just 10% of what was free before?
What a joke Google is becoming, they have alllllll this data but still behave like a greedy ass American corporation with huge ebbs and flows of money instead of using said data to be consistent, that’s what corporation should strive for: constant unending growth vs large jumps in growth followed by retraction because bad decisions were made in haste (pure greed)
Constant unending growth is unsustainable, that’s why they’re doing this. They always need more money hence enshittification!
The least they could have done was to make the plans available prior to the change so we can prepare.
I feel like a sitting duck waiting for April 1st to come around before I can get our 60+ customers over to the Lite plan.
All whilst they’re sat getting spammed to an oblivion until we’ve moved them over…
Am I misunderstanding this. I don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it (more so those in a similar situation).
And, the amount of development time to move many of our legacy sites over to another captcha just isn’t feasible. Or else, believe me I would.
> The least they could have done was to make the plans available prior to the change so we can prepare.
> Am I misunderstanding this. I don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about it (more so those in a similar situation).
Yes – I feel the same way.
I also keep checking the google documentation pages – and it is very odd to me that outside of the email sent couple months ago there was no more updates from google.
nada, zilch.
I have no reason to not believe the email – from what I can see other people got it too. very odd handling from google.
This one page has been updated to actually include the details of the “reCAPTCHA Standard” plan, but no word on the signup mechanism yet: https://cloud.google.com/security/products/recaptcha
Ah thank you! I was beginning to worry and think that I might have hallucinated the email or it was some elaborate April 1st trick. haha