reCAPTCHA Pricing 2026 (with Free Cost Calculator)

How much does Google reCAPTCHA cost?

Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise is free for the first 10,000 assessments per month. From 10,001 to 100,000 assessments per project you pay a flat $8/month fee. Above 100,000 assessments the reCAPTCHA cost is a further $1 per 1,000 assessments, billed in addition to the base fee.

The reCAPTCHA calculator above returns your projected monthly bill in seconds — enter your assessment volume and it applies Google's current pricing tiers.

Google reCAPTCHA pricing tiers (2026)

The 2024 reCAPTCHA price increase

Google introduced the current reCAPTCHA pricing model on 1 April 2024. Before that, reCAPTCHA Enterprise offered 1,000,000 free assessments per month. After the change, the free allowance dropped to 10,000 assessments and the tiered structure above kicks in.

Any site running more than about 10,000 verifications a month saw its Google reCAPTCHA cost rise as a direct result. Many teams then began evaluating alternatives, including Prosopo, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile. This is the pricing question most reCAPTCHA users are now really asking: is the assessment I get for that $8 still catching the traffic I need it to catch?

Is Google reCAPTCHA free?

Google reCAPTCHA has a free tier of 10,000 assessments per month. Beyond that threshold reCAPTCHA is no longer free — every project on the same Google Cloud billing account is charged the tiered rate above. A site making 250,000 verification requests per month will typically see a reCAPTCHA price of roughly $158/month.

Why teams leave reCAPTCHA in 2026

Sticker price is only one part of the story. When teams migrate away from reCAPTCHA in 2026, it's usually one of five reasons:

1. Silent overage billing. Sites cross 10,000 assessments/month without any in-dashboard alert, and the reCAPTCHA cost appears on the Google Cloud invoice weeks later. Small marketing spikes or bot floods can push the bill well past the projected amount.
2. Bot pass-through rate. Modern CAPTCHA-solving farms clear reCAPTCHA v3 tokens for roughly $1–$2 per 1,000. Vision models solve the image-grid v2 fallback with higher accuracy than humans. Paying $8–$1,000/month for verdicts that farms bypass is what most switchers cite first.
3. GDPR posture. reCAPTCHA drops third-party Google tracking cookies on every page load and feeds them into Google's advertising identifiers. For any site with EU visitors that requires a consent banner, a DPA entry and a Schrems II transfer basis before reCAPTCHA is legal to serve at all — see reCAPTCHA is now a data processor and GDPR-compliant CAPTCHA for the underlying analysis.
4. Billing-account requirement. Even the free tier requires a Google Cloud project with billing attached. Prosopo, Turnstile and hCaptcha Publisher all issue keys without a credit card.
5. No verdict traceability. reCAPTCHA returns a score from a model the operator cannot inspect. When a specific verdict is wrong, there is nothing to drill into.

reCAPTCHA vs Prosopo

Prosopo is a specialist bot and agent trust platform. Where reCAPTCHA returns a 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 billing account required, and includes the anti-spam and fraud-signal features that reCAPTCHA Enterprise bills separately. Open-source client stack. UK-incorporated. EU-processed. GDPR-native. See the best-captcha comparison for feature-by-feature detail, or the hCaptcha pricing calculator if you're comparing all three.

FAQs about reCAPTCHA pricing

How much does reCAPTCHA cost per verification?

Above the 100,000 assessment threshold, reCAPTCHA costs $0.001 per verification ($1 per 1,000). Below 100,000 the effective per-verification price falls to zero once the flat $8 fee is amortised.

Does Google reCAPTCHA v3 cost the same as v2?

Yes. Google now bills reCAPTCHA v2, reCAPTCHA v3, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise under the same assessment-based pricing model. There is no separate reCAPTCHA v3 price tier.

Is there a Google reCAPTCHA cost for low-traffic sites?

No. Sites staying under 10,000 assessments per month pay nothing. Once you cross that line the reCAPTCHA cost jumps to the flat $8 monthly fee, then scales linearly.

What was the reCAPTCHA price increase and when did it happen?

Google introduced the current reCAPTCHA pricing model on 1 April 2024. Before that, reCAPTCHA Enterprise offered 1,000,000 free assessments per month. After the reCAPTCHA price change, the free allowance dropped to 10,000 assessments and the tiered structure above kicks in. Any site running more than about 10,000 verifications a month saw its Google reCAPTCHA cost rise as a direct result. Many teams then began evaluating alternatives, including Prosopo, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile.

Does the Google reCAPTCHA price require a billing account?

Yes. Even to use the free 10,000 assessments per month tier, reCAPTCHA Enterprise requires a Google Cloud project with a billing account attached. Sites go over the free threshold silently and the reCAPTCHA cost then appears on the Google Cloud invoice at the end of the month. Prosopo does not require a billing account on the free tier.

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

reCAPTCHA is free up to 10,000 assessments and paid above. hCaptcha Pro is $139/month with 100,000 evaluations included (see the hCaptcha pricing calculator). Cloudflare Turnstile publishes no request cap on its free tier 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. Open-source client stack. UK-incorporated. EU-processed. GDPR-native.