[HN Gopher] Google significantly reduces recaptcha free tier, in...
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Google significantly reduces recaptcha free tier, introduces new
pricing models
Author : thunderbong
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-01-29 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bytepursuits.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bytepursuits.com)
| gs17 wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't just kill it outright if the data is no
| longer worth providing a reasonable price (hCaptcha seems to
| offer 1 million free still, Cloudflare claims unlimited use).
| gruez wrote:
| Google uses it internally, so they probably can't kill it
| outright. Might as well make some money from clueless
| enterprises while they're sunsetting it.
| vesrah wrote:
| Is there an official source for this yet?
| gs17 wrote:
| I got an email with exactly the content they described, didn't
| have a link to any page about this.
| singlepaynews wrote:
| The text of the email I received (I assume you got something
| similar):
|
| Dear -snip-,
|
| Starting April 1, 2024, we will be expanding existing
| features and providing additional pricing options for Google
| reCAPTCHA product tiers.
|
| What do you need to know?
|
| Starting April 1, 2024, the following price changes will be
| available with Google reCAPTCHA:
|
| Inclusion of transaction protection in reCAPTCHA Enterprise
| and a price reduction from $40 to $1 per 1,000 assessments.
| reCAPTCHA Enterprise will also include 10,000 no-cost
| assessments per month instead of 1 million. Addition of
| reCAPTCHA Standard for bot protection at $8/month for up to
| 100,000 assessments per month. Renaming of the reCAPTCHA no-
| cost product to reCAPTCHA Lite, providing protection for up
| to 10,000 instead of 1 million assessments per month. We will
| continue to provide 1 million no-cost reCAPTCHA Enterprise
| assessments per month to eligible Nonprofits, Charities, and
| Libraries.
|
| What do you need to do?
|
| Please complete the following actions based on your Google
| reCAPTCHA product tier:
|
| Existing reCAPTCHA Enterprise customers on a subscription
| contract:
|
| Nothing changes until your next renewal date. If your renewal
| date is after April 1, 2024, you will have the option to
| renew into the new reCAPTCHA Enterprise product.
|
| Existing reCAPTCHA Enterprise customers on a pay-as-you-go
| model:
|
| You will be automatically upgraded to the new reCAPTCHA
| Enterprise product after April 1, 2024.
|
| Please monitor your usage and make sure your new monthly bill
| is as expected at the end of April 2024.
|
| reCAPTCHA Classic (Non-Enterprise) customers:
|
| No action is required from you.
|
| You can upgrade to reCAPTCHA Standard or reCAPTCHA Enterprise
| to use the additional features.
|
| Eligible Nonprofits:
|
| Sign up for a Google for Nonprofits account to activate your
| non-profit subscription.
|
| Your affected projects are below: -snip- Thank you for
| choosing Google reCAPTCHA.
|
| --The Google reCAPTCHA Team
| gs17 wrote:
| Yes, that's the same email.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| So now that Google has extracted all that free labor to train
| their algorithms, they begin to close the spigot.
|
| I don't care, really. reCAPTCHA and the like can't die fast
| enough.
| SllX wrote:
| For the number I fill out in a week, Google should be paying me
| for the labor. Please, spike that price as high as you like. In
| fact go ahead and reduce the free allocation to zero while you're
| at it.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| I'm tired of picking motorcycles, busses, stairs and bicycles.
| Someone please clarify if you are supposed to pick the squares
| next to the object if they only have a tiny bit of the object
| there.
|
| And the actual process often fails to load some part of the
| picture, so then you have to refresh and start over. You can
| never just refresh the current 'test image'. I had captchas,
| because I figure the spammers have worked around them, and they
| constantly waste my time.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Someone please clarify if you are supposed to pick the
| squares next to the object if they only have a tiny bit of
| the object there._
|
| I dunno, I intentionally pick the wrong items in the second
| Captcha to poison their ML dataset, as Google's not paying me
| to be their forced-labor mechanical Turk, and I hope everyone
| does the same. Suck it Google, you trillion dollar
| cheapskate, pay for your damn labor.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Back when they were using the two word ones, a common meme
| on the internet was to put a swear or epithet as the second
| word.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| AND they try to push terms like "crosswalk" on us? Click on a
| "crosswalk"? No idea what that js, all I see is a zebra
| crossing. I already have to correct my son every time he says
| "on accident" and it will be a cold day in hell before I
| accept "crosswalk".
| ta8645 wrote:
| > have to correct my son every time he says "on accident"
|
| This used to bother me as well. But it is actually
| reasonable, since we have no objection to the opposite
| evocation of "on purpose". The language is just mutating
| normally.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I was mostly being facetious but "on accident" is a hill
| I'll die on. It's like nails on a chalkboard.
| Pufferbo wrote:
| Is crosswalk a NA regional term for pedestrian-crossing?
| SllX wrote:
| It is a term, the term I've always known that is
| synonymous with a pedestrian crossing, and I guess it's
| regional?
| ronsor wrote:
| Is your Accept-Language header set to en_US?
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Not sure to be honest, I'll have a check tomorrow. I'm
| not genuinely bothered by it, hopefully my rant came
| across in the playful tone I meant it.
|
| I do normally set the language in places, otherwise all
| my s's end up as z's (pronounced zed).
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Good, let it die. ReCAPTCHA is probably the worst captcha service
| available, anyway. God forbid if you're on a VPN.
| righthand wrote:
| I just type the wrong thing in the audio captcha option. Works
| like a charm.
|
| "politicians say that the industry" == "stalled morticians pay
| for the mystery"
| 0xy wrote:
| Cloudflare Turnstile is a free alternative, and there's also
| hCaptcha as a freemium alternative.
|
| ReCAPTCHA is not effective if your users are any way motivated.
| acdha wrote:
| Also reCAPTCHA's error rate is through the roof now. My nephew
| was unable to open a Steam account because it was erroneously
| rejecting correct responses and, of course, there's no way to
| report this which won't be ignored unless you can raise a fuss
| on social media or know someone who works at Google.
| askvictor wrote:
| Since switching from Chrom{e|ium} to Firefox, I'm noticing I'm
| having to fill in a _lot_ more captchas - is this just me, a
| coincidence, or is Google treating Firefox as less trustworthy?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| iirc many bots use Firefox UA string as their own.
| nawgz wrote:
| Google? Using its market position and suite of products to
| undermine competitors?
|
| How dare you imply they would partake in such unbecoming
| behavior.
| screamingninja wrote:
| That's the punishment for ad-blocking and/or tracking
| mitigations.
| TechRemarker wrote:
| Get the requests all the time in Safari, but when using Chrome
| almost never. But most likely since in Safari, have all the
| anti tracking enabled as well.
| sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
| Chrome is spyware to begin with; they know if you're a bot out
| of the gate.
|
| Captcha is redundant to the deeper spying Google does at this
| point.
|
| Likewise captcha is useless against multimodal LLM available to
| anybody, many of which can be run locally.
|
| I see this as a tacit admission captcha is a dead technology
| more than anything.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| > Likewise captcha is useless against multimodal LLM
| available to anybody, many of which can be run locally
|
| You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why captcha
| exists. If the attacker has to deploy a multimodal LLM to
| solve captcha, the service provider using captcha has already
| effectively achieved its goal - since the goal is to raise
| the cost (in terms of any combination of complexity,
| computing power, and dollar amount) of sending bulk traffic
| and ultimately to reduce, not eliminate, the overall attack
| rate. 0 bulk traffic is never the goal.
| swozey wrote:
| I used Firefox full time years ago (5+) and absolutely had to
| fill in more captchas. I remember thinking it all the time. I
| also remember seeing a lot of "Must be opened in chrome," sort
| of things google related.
|
| Chrome has your google auth SSO built in so I think chrome
| skips that skip, whether it's malevolent or necessary I
| wouldn't know.
| Macha wrote:
| It's not just Google, Humble has configured their cloudflare
| anti bot stuff so it randomly locks me out for days at a time
| for using Firefox on Linux.
|
| Support refuses to go beyond "have you tried clearing your
| cookies" when I raise this with them.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I get a lot in Brave also. A friend runs a startup whose
| platform I use, and he was surprised to hear I get 8-9 in a row
| sometimes, even though I'm in a browser that I've logged in
| with hundreds of times. Crazy.
| js4ever wrote:
| After doing the same for Google maps few years they just did it
| again. It's beyond me that anyone would use Google/GCP for
| anything serious. Services killed all the time (check Google
| graveyard), sdk and APIs constantly deprecated, prices increases,
| ... It seems google is doing everything wrong since at least a
| decade now.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Google continuing to forge ahead with the drug-dealer business
| model...
|
| Seriously Google, are you trying to convince even _yourselves_
| that you are just IBM with slightly better food? I mean, this
| change just reeks of "we're out of ideas but the bean counters
| told us we need to find change in the couch somewhere".
| hot_gril wrote:
| Their motto was "don't be evil," which translated to "don't
| take profits too early." Now they're in the profit-taking
| stage.
| m00x wrote:
| Sundar is doing to Google what Steve Ballmer did to MSFT.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Joke's on him. Steve Blamer has an estimated net worth of
| 120 billion while Sundar is estimate "only" at 1.6 billion.
| He could afford to hire Sundar as his pool boy.
|
| Also, he probably has car who's doors open like _this_ ,
| not like _this_.
| reactordev wrote:
| He'll be a quatro comas member before too long. Not tres,
| quatro...
| hot_gril wrote:
| I'm too young to remember much about Ballmer, I just know
| his "developers developers developers" speech that was far
| more candid and meaningful than Pichai's speeches. And it
| was also on point, provide stable APIs to devs.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Oh you mean this?
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dB1SvnzLs8c
| gs17 wrote:
| > with the drug-dealer business model
|
| Except there's another dealer selling at the old price and a
| third one giving even more away for free. hCaptcha is a pretty
| easy switch, and Turnstile has a reCAPTCHA compatibility mode.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Firebase Auth is pretty common and widely used. Any sort of
| phone number auth, like SMS second factor, requires
| reCAPTCHA. (And people can complain about how much SMS 2FA is
| bad, and I don't really disagree, but it is still pretty much
| a "lowest common denominator" method and many, many web users
| can't easily use TOTP or hardware keys).
|
| Switching out Firebase Auth is a much, much more difficult
| deal than just switching out reCAPTCHA.
| tonymet wrote:
| You can't hate the player OR the game in this case because it
| works. It's more like "fool me 100 times, shame on me"
| malermeister wrote:
| Wait, Google wants to be paid for having other people train their
| AI?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Question: ReCAPTCHA prevents automated browsing but does it allow
| Google through?
| gs17 wrote:
| According to the Google video linked on this page:
| https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-cant-see-content-...
| , "Googlebot doesn't fill out any captchas. Even if they are
| Google-based captchas we don't fill them out." That's from
| 2021, no idea if they changed it since then, and it probably
| works okay with reCAPTCHA v3.
| G0lDR0ger wrote:
| Doesn't look like the reCAPTCHA pricing page
| (https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha-enterprise/pricing) has been
| updated to reflect this.
| nerdjon wrote:
| And yet people still try to convince me that google's reputation
| is unwarranted and that relying on Google Cloud is perfectly fine
| since somehow it's "Different".
|
| It never ceases to amaze me how often google shoots themselves in
| the foot and just ruins their reputation.
|
| I cannot imagine relying on anything from google as a business.
| It just isn't worth the risk.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Does google reCAPTCHA have anything that other captcha solutions
| dont?
|
| Or what will stop people from using cheaper/free alternatives?
| tonymet wrote:
| It's funny to me how often the "first one's free (or cheap) "
| playbook gets used on Amazon, AirBNB, Uber, Netflix, Google,
| Facebook (with FB API), Datadog , Splunk - and still continues to
| work.
|
| Create a service and run it at a loss subsidized by investor
| funding. Customers & Partners naturally adopt it because it's
| cheap in the short term and they lack long term thinking. Kill
| all competition.
|
| Once the customers/partners are hooked, and the competition is
| gone, jack up the prices .
|
| Even massive businesses & consultants with actuaries fall prey to
| this, including hotels, movie studios, fortune 500s.
|
| Just remember there's no free lunch. If something is free or
| cheap then they are getting you hooked.
| skybrian wrote:
| Seems like the lesson is to take advantage of free stuff (or
| low prices) while you can? Nothing lasts forever, but they got
| some good years out of it.
|
| (Looks like reCaptcha started in 2007.)
| mey wrote:
| Been exceptionally wary of Atlassian's free beta products
| recently because of this.
| calmworm wrote:
| Google is more and more useless by the day. I use a VPN and I get
| a captcha challenge with every search, but that's not all, I
| still get blocked with a message saying something to the effect
| of "we've noticed unusual traffic so we're blocking you anyway"
| and I just can't use Google at all.
| seydor wrote:
| At what point do they start charging for all Gmail?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Looks like reCAPTCHA Enterprise is increasing in price for orgs
| up to 1.02475m impressions per month, but decreasing for everyone
| above that. Reducing the sticker price from $40 to $1 per
| thousand could be transformational for some businesses. For big
| users, this seems great.
|
| For medium sized users - 10k to 1m impressions - this sucks, but
| for many will only suck to the tune of $8/m. Users between 100k
| and 1m who haven't been paying the $40/k this is tricky, but I
| wonder how many are in that category.
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