While your service is of high quality, the pricing is completely unreasonable for private use cases, many times higher than hosting the site in the first place.
Re:Botspam apocalypse
by dj_mc_merlin on Thursday August 04, 2022 @08:18AM
(#32341868)
I think the it depends on what counts as a "request" in terms of pricing. Is it only successful checks? Pricing would be fine then. If it also includes failed checks then there is no point in the service, including the Advanced plan. Would eat through the entire credit in a day.
If it was on successful validations, they would called it so, no it’s on every request, even failed ones.
I had a look into their terms and they seem to count requests but charge for successful validations.
Re:Botspam apocalypse
by protoduction on Thursday August 04, 2022 @07:34AM
(#32341592)
I'm sorry to hear that. We offer free and small plans for small use-cases, but I also understand that some projects don't have a budget at all.
There is a blessed source-available version of the server that you can self-host [0]. It is more limited in its protection, but it is probably good enough for hobby projects.
[0]: https://github.com/FriendlyCaptcha/friendly-lite-server
A big part of what makes our captcha successful in fighting abuse is that we scale the difficulty of the proof-of-work puzzle based on the user’s previous behavior and other signals (e.g. minus points if their IP address is a known datacenter IP).
The nice thing about a scaling PoW setup is that it’s not all-or-nothing unlike other captcha’s. Most captcha’s can be solved by “most” humans, but that means that there is still some subset of all humans that you are excluding. In our case if we do get it wrong and wrongly think the user is a bot, the user may have to solve a puzzle for a while, but after that they are accepted nonetheless.
[0]: https://friendlycaptcha.com