Billing information

This document describes billing for reCAPTCHA.

How billing works

Your billing status and usage volume automatically determine your reCAPTCHA tier. The following rules allow your reCAPTCHA tier to adapt to your needs:

  1. When you create a new key in a project that does not have billing enabled, you are automatically put in the Essentials tier, which gives you 10,000 free assessments each month with a basic set of features.
  2. When you enable billing on your project, you are automatically upgraded to the Standard tier, which gives you 10,000 free assessments each month with an advanced set of features.
  3. When you pass 10,000 assessments each month in the Standard tier, you are charged a flat $8 that covers your usage up to 100,000 assessments.
  4. When you pass 100,000 assessments each month, you automatically transition to the Enterprise tier, where you are charged $0.001 for each assessment over 100,000.

High-volume users, contact Sales to discuss a subscription with volume discounts.

When to enable billing

To enable and use reCAPTCHA on Google Cloud, you don't need to enable billing for your Google Cloud project. However, you need to enable billing for your Google Cloud project in the following scenarios:

  • You expect to exceed the free monthly allowance of reCAPTCHA, which is 10,000 assessments per month. For more information about the free monthly allowance, see Pricing.

  • You are about to exceed the free monthly allowance of reCAPTCHA and you want to continue using reCAPTCHA to protect your website or mobile application.

    You will receive email notifications to enable billing when you are approaching the free monthly allowance and when you exceed it. Enabling the billing account before you exceed the free monthly allowance helps to keep you and your users safe from fraudulent activities, spam, and abuse.

    If you don't enable billing for your Google Cloud project, reCAPTCHA returns an error for any new request after you reach the free monthly allowance.

  • You want access to features that are exclusive to reCAPTCHA Standard and Enterprise tiers. Enabling billing is required for those features even if you expect your usage to be within the free monthly allowance.

To learn how to enable billing for your project, see Enable billing for a project.

Billing resources

Use the following resources to get help with billing questions: