19 October 2026 · Site Methodology & Corrections · 5 min read
I was re-checking our reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile vs hCaptcha calculator this week and ran the default 100,000-assessments-a-month scenario through it out of habit. It said $90. I'd have believed that a year ago. It's wrong now, and has been wrong since April. The real number for that exact traffic level is $8.
On 2 April 2026, Google cut reCAPTCHA's free tier from 1 million assessments a month down to 10,000 -- a change that got a fair amount of coverage at the time. What got less attention: three weeks later, on 22 April, Google folded reCAPTCHA into Google Cloud Fraud Defense and restructured it into three tiers -- Essentials, Premium, and Enterprise -- and Premium doesn't bill the way I assumed it would. It's not "free tier, then meter everything else." It's free up to 10,000, then a flat $8/month for the entire 10,001-to-100,000 range, and only past 100,000 does per-1,000 metering (roughly $1 per 1,000, the old Enterprise-style rate) start again.
Our calculator had the free-tier cut right -- 10,000/month, correctly updated months ago. What it never picked up was the flat band sitting right after it. The formula just kept metering straight through from 10,000 to infinity at $1/1,000, which happens to be exactly correct above 100,000 and exactly wrong everywhere between 10,001 and 100,000.
At 100,000 assessments/month -- a perfectly ordinary volume for a site with real signup and login traffic -- the old formula computed (100,000 − 10,000) / 1,000 × $1 = $90. The actual bill at that exact volume is $8. That's not a rounding difference, it's off by a factor of over 11. At 50,000/month the old formula said $40; real cost is still $8. At 15,000/month it said $5; real cost is $8 -- the one place the old number undershot, because the flat fee doesn't scale down either. The one thing that stayed correct the whole time: anything under 10,000/month ($0) and anything over 100,000/month, where the $1-per-1,000 Enterprise-style rate kicks in on top of the $8 base.
| Assessments/mo | Old formula said | Google actually charges |
|---|---|---|
| 9,000 | $0 | $0 |
| 15,000 | $5 | $8 |
| 50,000 | $40 | $8 |
| 100,000 | $90 | $8 |
| 250,000 | $240 | $158 |
This isn't a cosmetic fix -- it flips the competitive picture in the exact band most small-to-mid sites live in. hCaptcha Pro's flat-rate plan runs roughly $99/month billed annually. Our old formula made reCAPTCHA look like it tracked hCaptcha dollar-for-dollar once both allowances were used up -- a believable, boring parity story. The real story is that between 10,001 and 100,000 assessments a month, reCAPTCHA at a flat $8 is roughly 12x cheaper than hCaptcha Pro, not a close call at all. Cloudflare Turnstile is still free and still wins outright at every volume if you don't need reCAPTCHA's or hCaptcha's risk scoring -- that part never changed. What changed is that "reCAPTCHA costs about what hCaptcha costs" stopped being true for a huge chunk of real-world traffic the moment Google added a flat middle tier, and our calculator kept telling people the old story for six months.
The reCAPTCHA vs Turnstile vs hCaptcha calculator now models the real three-band shape: $0 to 10,000, a flat $8 from 10,001 to 100,000, then the $1-per-1,000 Enterprise rate beyond that -- with the $8 Premium fee exposed as its own editable input, not buried in a single rate field. I updated the prose, the FAQ answers, and the FAQ schema to match, and moved the "last checked" date to today. I didn't touch hCaptcha, Turnstile, or Arkose Labs on that page -- all three checked out against their current published pricing while I was in there.
This is the second round of this exercise -- the first one caught a fabricated LogRocket tier name, a Mapbox product mix-up, and two missing ElevenLabs tiers. Neither of those was a typo. Both were the same root cause as this one: a vendor restructures their pricing shape -- not just the number, the shape -- and a page built on the old shape keeps producing numbers that are internally consistent and completely wrong. A linear per-unit formula doesn't fail loudly when a vendor adds a flat band in the middle of it; it just quietly overcharges everyone who asks about that exact range, forever, until someone reruns the default scenario and notices the number looks too round to be a coincidence.
I'm not done. The practice now is the same one I said last time I'd keep doing: pick calculator pages with tiered or banded vendor pricing specifically, since that's where a "simple metered formula" quietly goes stale, and re-run them against the vendor's current page instead of trusting that last quarter's formula still matches this quarter's billing shape.
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Checked directly against Google's published reCAPTCHA / Google Cloud Fraud Defense pricing, 2026-10-19. Reference figures, not live quotes -- confirm current terms directly with Google before budgeting.