reCAPTCHA Pricing 2026: Free Tier, Enterprise Costs, Limits

reCAPTCHA pricing in 2026

Google bills reCAPTCHA per assessment, and one assessment is one check of one token. The first 10,000 assessments a month are free for your whole organization; after that you pay a flat $8 up to 100,000 and $1 per 1,000 above.

Prices in US dollars per month. Google moves you between tiers automatically as your volume changes, and Premium needs a billing account in Google Cloud.

One naming change to know about: since 22 April 2026 Google sells reCAPTCHA as part of Google Cloud Fraud Defense, and the contract terms now say “Google Cloud Fraud Defense (formerly reCAPTCHA Enterprise)”. The tiers on the price list still carry the reCAPTCHA name.

Is reCAPTCHA free?

Yes, up to 10,000 assessments a month. That allowance belongs to your Google Cloud organization, not to a single site: Google adds up every key and every website you run. A company site with one contact form stays well inside it. A shop that checks every login, signup and checkout reaches it fast, because every check counts.

Above the free tier, everything depends on whether billing is set up. Without it, Google does something you would not expect. The older SiteVerify API keeps answering success: true with a score of 0.9 and only adds an error message, while the newer CreateAssessment API returns an HTTP 429 error. If your backend only looks at success, an unpaid key over the limit lets every request through. The forms keep working, and nothing tells you they stopped being protected.

reCAPTCHA v3 pricing

reCAPTCHA v3 has no price of its own. Every v3 token your server checks is one assessment, billed by the table above: free up to 10,000 a month, then $8 up to 100,000 and $1 per 1,000 beyond.

On the free Essentials tier, v3 returns only four score values (0.1, 0.3, 0.7 and 0.9); the full scale with 11 levels needs Premium. And Google suggests running v3 in the background of pages as well as on forms. If you check all of those tokens, your count grows much faster than with a checkbox on a single form.

reCAPTCHA v2 pricing

The same rules apply to v2. Checkbox and invisible v2 keys are billed as assessments once the 10,000 free ones are used up, exactly like v3.

What changed is where the keys live. Google stopped issuing new “classic” keys in 2024 and moved the existing ones into Google Cloud projects between late 2025 and early 2026. Old v2 and v3 site keys kept working, but they now count against your organization’s free allowance and need billing above it. How the two versions differ is explained in reCAPTCHA v2 vs v3.

Sample reCAPTCHA bills

The tiers add up like this: an $8 flat fee for assessments 10,001 through 100,000, and $0.001 per assessment after that. The figures below follow that rule on the Premium tier, pay as you go. The support column assumes Enhanced Support and no other Google Cloud spend.

Two things make the real bill harder to predict than the table below. Account, password, SMS and transaction defense each require an extra assessment, so a login that runs bot defense and password defense counts twice. And every token can be checked only once: a visitor who submits a form again after an error creates another assessment.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise pricing

Enterprise is no longer simply “everything above 100,000 assessments”. On Google’s current price list, high volume without a contract stays on Premium at $1 per 1,000. Enterprise is a subscription: you commit to a fixed monthly volume at $1 per 1,000 assessments for at least 12 months. A commitment of one million assessments a month comes to about $1,000 a month, roughly $12,000 over the minimum term.

What the commitment buys is mostly service. Enterprise adds the full policy engine (Premium allows three rules), dedicated account management, a fraud report for your account and attack investigation. Detection itself is the same: Premium already has the 11 score levels and account defense.

Support costs extra

No reCAPTCHA tier includes a support plan; Google lists support as “available from Google Cloud” for all three. The Cloud support plans are charged on your whole Google Cloud account:

• Standard Support: 3% of your monthly Cloud charges, at least $29 a month.
• Enhanced Support: 10% of your monthly Cloud charges (on the first $10,000), at least $100 a month. Google describes it as built for production workloads with fast response times.
• Premium Support: at least $15,000 a month.

For a small reCAPTCHA bill, the support plan is the larger cost. That is worth knowing before a procurement team compares an $8 line item with a fixed-price CAPTCHA.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

The price list itself is simple. The changes around it are what pushed many sites into paying:

• Classic reCAPTCHA used to be free for most websites. Since the migration into Google Cloud, only 10,000 assessments a month per organization are free.
• Since 2 April 2026 Google acts as a data processor under its Cloud Data Processing Addendum, and you are the sole controller of the data.
• Since 22 April 2026 reCAPTCHA is part of Google Cloud Fraud Defense.

The full timeline, including what the processor change means for your privacy policy, is in our overview of reCAPTCHA changes.

Privacy work is not on the bill

The processor role helps, but it moves work to you. Before reCAPTCHA goes live, someone on your side has to:

• decide whether your use of reCAPTCHA needs consent and, if it does, load it only after the visitor agrees;
• describe it in your privacy policy: who processes the data, why, on which legal basis, where it goes and how long it is kept;
• add it to your records of processing;
• assess the transfer of the data to Google;
• check Google’s data processing terms, and check them again whenever Google changes them, as it did in April 2026.

None of this is on Google’s invoice, but it costs time. As an example: if your data protection officer or lawyer needs 4 to 8 hours for it at €150 to €250 an hour, that is €600 to €2,000 before the first request is checked, plus a few hours for every later change to Google’s terms. Your own hours and rates will differ.

Google classes its _GRECAPTCHA cookie as necessary; whether your use of reCAPTCHA needs consent is a question for your legal team. For the details, read is reCAPTCHA GDPR compliant. With TrustCaptcha there is no cookie to assess and no transfer outside the EU, so there is less to review.

TrustCaptcha pricing compared

On list price, reCAPTCHA is hard to beat at low volume: 50,000 assessments cost $8. TrustCaptcha is not the cheapest option per check. The difference is in what the price includes and where the data goes.

Every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and best-effort e-mail support is included in Team and Enterprise; support add-ons with guaranteed response times start at €99 a month. A verification counts when a visitor’s browser starts the CAPTCHA, so visitors who never reach the widget don’t count. Current prices are on the TrustCaptcha pricing page.

Try TrustCaptcha

TrustCaptcha checks visitors with proof-of-work and bot scoring, without cookies, and includes a Data Processing Agreement for every customer. Start your 14-day free trial and see what a fixed monthly price looks like on your own traffic.