The same captcha costs $0.10 or $2.99, depending only on who you ask

Nine services sell the answer to the same challenge. Every one publishes a captcha solving price, and on 5 September 2026 theirs ran from $0.10 to $2.99 per 1,000 solves for reCAPTCHA v2.

Same challenge. Same unit. Twenty-nine times apart.

Here is the whole spread, read from each service's own rate card on that date.

The cheapest row is not the cheapest service

AZcaptcha appears twice, and the gap between its own two rows is ten times.

It prices reCAPTCHA v2 at $1.00 and reCAPTCHA v2 Grid at $0.10. Grid is the image-selection version, the one that asks you to click every square with a traffic light in it. The plain row is the token flow. Both are reCAPTCHA v2 and one costs a tenth of the other.

So a buyer comparing headline numbers is not comparing the same work. That is why the table above carries each service's own label beside its price, and why we keep those labels word for word. Collapsing them into one number per service would hide the thing worth knowing.

Two services publish what the solver earns

A captcha is cleared by a model, a person, or a model that hands the hard ones to a person. Where a person does it, there is a wage, and two of the ten services publish theirs.

2Captcha states it pays between $0.14 and $0.60 per 1,000 on its recruitment page. It charges buyers $1.00 to $2.99 for reCAPTCHA v2 on its pricing page. SolveCaptcha states $0.25 to $0.60 per 1,000 to the solver, and charges $0.55.

We publish both figures and calculate nothing between them. The wage is quoted without naming a challenge type and the buyer price always names one, so any ratio would rest on an assumption about which captcha the person solved. Both numbers come from the same company's own pages, dated, and the reader can draw their own conclusion.

The other eight say nothing about who does the work. Four of them have no recruitment page at all.

Why nobody has put these prices in one place

The pages that rank for captcha pricing belong to the services themselves. 2Captcha publishes a comparison of captcha solving services. CapSolver publishes a list of the best solvers. Both rank themselves first, which is the only outcome available to them.

Below the sellers sit the software directories, and they are worse. One lists AmpleLogic, iDoc and Relyence FRACAS as alternatives to 2Captcha. Those are quality-management and document-control products. Nobody read the page.

One dedicated review site does cover this category properly, with pages for twenty-two services and thirteen challenge types. Its figures carry no read date, and the most recent year printed anywhere on the page we checked was 2024. On a product whose rates move week to week, an undated price is a memory.

Three services will not quote you a per-solve price

Two sell prepaid packages and one publishes figures with no product name against them. None of the three can be compared on the axis above, and that is a fact about how they price rather than a gap in the table.

What this means if you are buying

Price the challenge you actually hit rather than the one on the headline. A service advertising its cheapest rate is usually quoting its easiest type, and the type your target serves may cost several times that on the same account. The reCAPTCHA v2 rates and the hCaptcha rates sit on separate pages here for that reason.

Read the label beside the number. reCAPTCHA v2 and reCAPTCHA v2 Grid are both reCAPTCHA v2 and differ tenfold at one service.

Ask what happens on a failure before you buy, and keep the answer. A cheaper rate that clears fewer challenges costs more per page you keep, and no service here publishes a success figure you could compare against another.

The full table of every rate, and what each service says about who does the solving, is on captcha solvers. To price a month at your own volume, use the captcha solver cost calculator. And if the solves you are paying for are inside a test suite rather than a production workflow, stop: the vendors publish test keys for exactly that, and a fixture that uses them costs nothing per run.

Every price above is what one page said on 5 September 2026. Check it against the vendor before you spend anything, because ours is a reading and theirs is the bill.