Friendly Captcha alternative: what changes is the price per domain

We are not arguing about the mechanism

Worth saying before the tables, because most comparison pages waste a screen on it. Friendly Captcha is a proof-of-work captcha: the visitor's browser does a small amount of computation to prove the request is worth serving, instead of making a person identify a crosswalk. So is ours. Neither of us shows your visitors a puzzle, and neither of us needs them to click anything.

So the mechanism is not the decision. The decision is price per domain, what each plan actually includes, and what each company puts in writing. In that order.

Price, at the same number of sites

Two things make a straight comparison awkward, and we would rather name them than quietly smooth them over. Friendly Captcha meters monthly requests; we meter monthly solves. Those are not identical units and we have not converted one into the other. And their free plan is non-commercial use only, which rules it out for the agency reading this.

Where the line sits. At one site with real volume, their €9 Starter is a fair price and our €19 Starter is worse value — you would be buying nine domains you do not need. The thing worth knowing is that our free plan carries the same nominal 1,000-a-month allowance as their €9 Starter, on two domains instead of one, and allows commercial use. For a single small business site, that is the comparison, and it is €0 against €9.

From about three sites onwards the domain limits take over, and they take over sharply: the step from Growth to Advanced is €39 to €200, because there is nothing in between. Ten client sites costs €200 a month there and €19 here. That is the whole reason this page exists.

Where Friendly Captcha is ahead of us

Four things, and we would rather you heard them from us than found them later.

They publish an EU-only data-centre commitment. We do not. "Dedicated data centers (e.g. EU only)" is listed as a feature of their Advanced plan at €200 a month. botshield.dev is served through Cloudflare, which terminates TLS for every verification request and sees the visitor's IP, so we make no EU-only claim. If a contractual commitment on data location is your actual requirement, their €200 tier addresses it in writing and our €19 tier does not — and no amount of price advantage changes that. Buy the thing that meets your requirement.

They commit to 99.9% uptime at that tier. We commit to no uptime figure at all. We would rather publish nothing than publish a number we have not measured, but you should read the absence as what it is: no service-level commitment from us today.

They are an established German company. Their compliance story, their references and their survival odds are all better documented than ours. If you are placing a dependency for a client's production forms, that is a legitimate thing to weigh, and "one small studio" is the honest description of us.

Their Enterprise tier offers a self-hosted endpoint. If your requirement is that the verification never leaves infrastructure you control, we do not have an answer and they do.

Where we are ahead

Also four, all of them readable off the table above or runnable from your terminal.

Price from three domains upward. €19 against €39 at five sites; €19 against €200 at ten; €99 against €200 at fifty, with four times the volume allowance.

A free plan you can use commercially. Theirs is non-commercial only. Ours is 1,000 solves a month on two domains with no card, which is a working production captcha for a small site.

Metering by solves rather than by request. A form that gets hammered for an hour draws down a monthly allowance rather than tripping a daily or hourly ceiling.

Privacy claims you can check in forty seconds instead of reading. This is the one we would most like you to actually do:

# No cookie from either URL:
curl -sD - -o /dev/null https://botshield.dev/sdk.js | grep -i set-cookie
curl -sD - -o /dev/null -X POST https://botshield.dev/api/v1/solve | grep -i set-cookie

# No storage, no fingerprinting, and every host it contacts:
curl -s https://botshield.dev/sdk.js > sdk.js
grep -c -E 'document\.cookie|localStorage|sessionStorage|indexedDB|canvas|navigator\.userAgent|AudioContext|WebGL' sdk.js
grep -o -E 'https?://[a-zA-Z0-9./_-]+' sdk.js | sort -u

Measured on 9 October 2026: no Set-Cookie header, zero matches, one host. The build your visitors load is 22,235 bytes and the readable one is 40,453, both of which you can read end to end; the server code, including the function that truncates IPv4 addresses to /24 and IPv6 to /56 before anything is logged, is public at github.com/spaghettisi/scaptcha. Our processors — and a section headed "what we have not yet verified, we are not claiming" — are in our privacy policy.

One more endpoint exists and you should hear it from us: /api/v1/verify, the server-side check. Your server calls that one, with your secret key, after a form is submitted — the visitor's browser never touches it. That is why the commands above only cover the two paths the widget uses, and it is in our documentation, not hidden behind it.

Which one to buy

• One site? Start on our free plan — same volume as their €9 Starter, commercial use allowed, and it costs nothing. Invisible mode is included, so you are testing the real thing rather than a cut-down version of it. If you outgrow 1,000 solves on one site, their €9 Starter is better value than our €19.
• Three to fifty client sites? We are cheaper at every step — by two times at five sites, eleven at ten, four at twenty-five, two at fifty — and that is the case this page is making.
• Need a written commitment on data location, or an uptime SLA, or a self-hosted endpoint? Friendly Captcha Advanced or Enterprise. We do not have those, and we are not going to imply we do to win a €19 sale.

Start on the free plan

1,000 solves a month, 2 domains, commercial use allowed, no card. Two lines of code, the same proof-of-work mechanism you were already shopping for, and invisible mode included on the free plan rather than held back for a paid one.

Start free