Google ReCAPTCHA Pricing Update: What Website Owners Need to Know

Categories: Google Security

By Debra on December 19, 2024

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Google ReCAPTCHA, a widely used tool for protecting websites from bots and abuse, now operates under a tiered pricing model. Here’s a quick overview of the changes and how to set it up.

New Pricing Model

Google now offers a free tier for up to 10,000 assessments per month. Beyond this, usage incurs costs. For full pricing details, visit the ReCAPTCHA pricing page.

How to Set Up ReCAPTCHA Billing

Create a Google Cloud Account: Sign in at Google Cloud. New users must create an account.
Set Up Billing: Go to Billing Menu >> to Payment Method >> Add a credit card, even for free-tier usage, to verify identity and enable billing if needed.
Generate API Keys at: official Google ReCAPTCHA page.

Key Takeaways for Website Owners

Using ReCAPTCHA now requires a Google Cloud account and a credit card. While the free tier covers up to 10,000 assessments per month, high-traffic sites need to track usage to avoid unexpected charges.

More from Google

We received this informational email from Google January 18, 2024

We’re writing to inform you that all Google reCAPTCHA keys will need to be migrated to a Google Cloud project by the end of 2025. This will unite all reCAPTCHA customers under a single set of terms, a consistent pricing structure, and provide access to advanced security features.

We’ve provided additional information below to guide you through this change.

What you need to do

We will apply the change in phases throughout the year, reaching out again by email when your keys become eligible. At that time, we will automatically create a Google Cloud project for you and associate your keys to it.

However, we recommend that you get ahead of this process by following these instructions to manually migrate from reCAPTCHA Classic. This way you will be able to prescribe exactly which Google Cloud project you’ll associate with your key. Once you complete this process, the following features will be enabled immediately via Google Cloud console:

Enterprise-grade dashboarding
Monitoring
Reporting
Logging
Auditing
Access control

You can enter your monthly reCAPTCHA usage into this pricing calculator to forecast what charges may apply to your usage. You can also learn more about how reCAPTCHA billing works here.

Note: No code changes are required to your current integration. You may continue to safely use your key on the legacy SiteVerify API endpoint even after this change. However, we also recommend that you migrate to the current CreateAssessment API endpoint to get access to all the latest reCAPTCHA features.

How LaLa can help

We’ll formulate a strategy to assist all existing LaLa clients with this issue. We’ll be in touch soon.