hCaptcha Pricing 2026 (with Free Cost Calculator)

How much does hCaptcha cost?

hCaptcha Pro starts at $139/month and includes 100,000 evaluations. Beyond the included volume the hCaptcha price is a further $0.99 per 1,000 evaluations. The free hCaptcha Publisher plan remains available but strips out enterprise controls, custom themes, and the low-friction bot score API.

The hCaptcha calculator above returns your projected monthly bill in seconds — enter your evaluation volume and it applies hCaptcha's current pricing.

hCaptcha pricing tiers (2026)

Based on hCaptcha's published rates (2026). Enterprise pricing is quoted per contract.

Why teams leave hCaptcha in 2026

hCaptcha positions itself as the privacy-first reCAPTCHA alternative, but in practice several architectural choices push teams to switch. Five reasons that come up repeatedly:

1. Publisher-plan image challenges harm real users. The Publisher tier is funded by serving image puzzles that hCaptcha's parent company sells access to. Real users solve captchas so hCaptcha can label training data — the same trade you make with reCAPTCHA v2 traffic-light grids, minus the Google brand.
2. $139/month jump with no middle tier. There is nothing between the free Publisher plan and Pro at $139/month. A small SaaS on 20,000 evaluations/month either accepts the image-puzzle UX of the free tier or moves to Pro pricing for hobby-scale traffic. Annual billing brings Pro down to $99/month; still a step change from free.
3. GDPR posture doesn't hold up under scrutiny. hCaptcha is operated by US-based Intuition Machines and collects IP, interaction timing, mouse/gyroscope data, browser and hardware fingerprints. EU deployments rely on the fragile EU–US Data Privacy Framework post-Schrems II. See hCaptcha GDPR concerns for the full analysis.
4. Risk scoring and custom threat models live on Enterprise. hCaptcha's own documentation puts risk scoring, custom threat models and dedicated SOC review sessions on the Enterprise plan — not Pro. Mid-market teams paying $139/month for Pro still can't tune the detector or export a per-request risk score.
5. Accessibility remains a persistent complaint. Image challenges are the default for most users. The text-challenge alternative is opt-in per site rather than universal, and screen-reader flows have long been reported as broken — a real conversion issue on any site with an accessibility commitment.

hCaptcha vs Prosopo

Prosopo is a specialist bot and agent trust platform. Where hCaptcha returns a bot-score from a model the operator cannot inspect, Prosopo returns a verdict that traces to a rule the operator wrote, on a proprietary detector with a decision-machine architecture that ships new detection to production in days rather than SDK release cycles. Prosopo pricing starts free at 10,000 verifications/month with no image challenges served to real users, then $39/month at 100k — a genuine middle tier between free and enterprise. Every paid plan ships a spam filter that hCaptcha doesn't. Open-source client stack. UK-incorporated. EU-processed. GDPR-native. If you're evaluating hCaptcha pricing against reCAPTCHA see the Google reCAPTCHA pricing calculator and the best captcha comparison.

FAQs about hCaptcha pricing

Is hCaptcha free?

hCaptcha's Publisher plan is free to use, but it monetises via user challenges and doesn't include dashboard analytics or bot-score APIs. If you need those features the paid hCaptcha price is $139/month.

How does hCaptcha pricing compare to reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is free up to 10,000 assessments/month, then $8 flat to 100,000 and $1 per 1,000 above. hCaptcha Pro is $139/month with 100,000 evaluations included, then $0.99 per 1,000. At volumes above ~150,000 monthly evaluations the two crossover: reCAPTCHA Enterprise scales linearly at $1 per 1,000, hCaptcha Pro's overage sits at $0.99 per 1,000 on top of the $139 base.

Does hCaptcha Pro cost include Enterprise features?

No. Enterprise-tier features (custom accuracy models, SLA, compliance packs) are quoted separately. The $139 hCaptcha price covers the Pro tier only.

What is the hCaptcha free limit?

The free hCaptcha Publisher plan has no strict request limit but the model is different: hCaptcha itself monetises Publisher-plan traffic by serving image challenges that its parent company sells access to. The dashboard analytics, the low-friction bot-score API, custom themes and enterprise controls are only available on the paid Pro plan starting at $139/month.

How much does hCaptcha Enterprise cost?

hCaptcha Enterprise pricing is custom and quoted per contract. It adds features that the Pro tier does not include: custom accuracy models, an SLA, compliance packs (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and higher-accuracy bot detection. Enterprise buyers evaluating hCaptcha at this level should also see the Prosopo vs hCaptcha comparison.

hCaptcha vs Prosopo, reCAPTCHA and Cloudflare Turnstile as a captcha vendor

hCaptcha Pro is $139/month with 100,000 evaluations included, then $0.99 per 1,000 above. reCAPTCHA is free up to 10,000 assessments/month and paid above (see the reCAPTCHA pricing calculator). Cloudflare Turnstile publishes no request cap on its free plan but reserves per-endpoint policies and risk scoring for a Cloudflare Enterprise WAF contract (see the Cloudflare Turnstile pricing page). Prosopo starts free at 10,000 verifications/month and is the specialist option for operators who want every verdict traceable to a rule they authored, on a proprietary detector that reaches production in days rather than SDK release cycles. Ships per-endpoint access control, bot protection and a spam filter from the free tier upwards. Open-source client stack. UK-incorporated. EU-processed. GDPR-native.