Google plans to charge reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare immediately looks for another CAPTCHA service instead

Cloudflare Inc. is a US company that provides content distribution networks, Internet security services, and domain name distribution services. Recently, Cloudflare said it would replace Google’s reCAPTCHA with hCaptcha.

Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the move was made due to Google’s plans to charge reCAPTCHA usage. “The annual cost will increase by millions of dollars,” CEO Matthew Prince said: “Google is perfectly reasonable to request payment for the services they provide.”

In the near future, Cloudflare will start integrating a new anti-bot CAPTCHA service called hCaptcha to replace reCAPTCHA. hCaptcha is provided by Intuition Machines.

Intuition Machines make money by giving access to hCaptcha to companies that need to run image classification tests, then pay a portion of the money for websites to deploy hCaptcha.

However, Cloudflare said it will not need to receive money from Intuition Machines, instead pay an additional fee (this fee is only a fraction of the reCAPTCHA fee). CEO Matthew Prince said that this generous move aims to help Intuition Machines develop the infrastructure to meet Cloudflare’s requirements.

According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is currently the DNS provider for 11.3% of all websites and provides reverse-proxy (firewall) for 12.4% of all websites on the internet. This company is holding huge traffic every day.

In addition, Cloudflare said that the hCaptcha service collects less user data than Google’s reCAPTCHA, and also works better in China (where Google’s services are blocked).

Reference: zdnet