Solving CAPTCHAs is a cost and a red flag
If you're paying to solve CAPTCHAs at scale, an official API or a lighter footprint is usually cheaper and safer. Compare scraping approaches in the search & scraping guides.
The economics of captcha solving
Solving services price per 1,000 captchas: simple image captchas run $0.50–$1.00, reCAPTCHA v2 around $1–$3, and hCaptcha or funCAPTCHA $2–$5. Latency matters as much as price — cheap services average 15–40 seconds per solve, which stalls any pipeline processing volume. For legitimate accessibility or QA automation, budget the retry rate too: failed solves still bill on some providers, and a 10% failure rate on a million captchas is real money. Enterprise anti-bot vendors have shifted to invisible scoring partly because solve-farms made visible challenges a pure cost race.