January 30, 2024
Whether deprecating features or entire product lines, changing their APIs in ways that create high development costs, or making previously popular products or integrations impossible thanks to phony "security-washing" or "privacy-washing" changes, Google's disregard for users and developers is legendary.
One recent example: to protect their ad business, Google has disabled Chrome features that ad blocking plugins rely on, limiting them via gratuitous changes in its "Manifest V3" interface that purport to have some user-facing security benefit.
No other browser maker agrees with their strategy, and this trend is common across their actions: a change that benefits Google and harms others is presented as having some more noble justification.
Google's latest developer-hostile change
The latest such change is a reduction of their reCAPTCHA free tier from 1,000,000 requests per month to just 10,000 requests. This also greatly increases prices for reCAPTCHA Enterprise customers.
hCaptcha's free tier remains at 1,000,000 requests per month, and our hCaptcha Enterprise product suite continues to deliver excellent ROI while delivering substantial cost savings.
hCaptcha has helped many of the world's largest companies rapidly migrate from reCAPTCHA thanks to our compatible, and completely stable APIs, which receive only additive changes.
How much is a reCAPTCHA really worth anyway?
You may be interested to see our analysis of how useful reCAPTCHA really is, which includes dark web pricing data we have collected since 2016.
The summary is that reCAPTCHA charges more per request than it costs to purchase a reCAPTCHA token from criminals.
How can you avoid this abusive reCAPTCHA price increase?
hCaptcha Enterprise is used by online services of all sizes around the world, including category leaders like Shopify.
Learn why we have grown at an amazing pace with a demo or free pilot of our Enterprise service, or sign up for our free or Pro services today.
You'll soon see the difference in a true focus on security, rather than laundering your users' data to sell ads.
Across many customer A/B tests hCaptcha consistently outperforms reCAPTCHA on every metric, including ROI, and offers a far more complete security platform at the same time.
