What CAPTCHA solving actually costs (the line items nobody prints)

The sticker price on a CAPTCHA solving service is almost never what you actually pay. Two services can both say "$1 per thousand" and cost you wildly different amounts by month's end, because the per-solve rate is one line in the bill. The rest hides in failed attempts, proxies, and a plan you didn't need.

Here's the honest breakdown of where the money goes, and a way to estimate your real cost before you commit.

Disclosure up front: I work on Peak, one of these services, so I'll use its numbers as the concrete example. The framework below is vendor-neutral — the point is how to read any pricing page, not which logo to pick.

The pricing models you'll see

Per-solve (pay as you go). You're quoted a rate per thousand solves. At Peak that's $0.90 per 1,000, so $0.0009 a solve — under a tenth of a cent. You add funds and draw them down. No monthly floor, no expiry.

Subscription / threads. Some services sell monthly plans priced by concurrent "threads" rather than solves. It can look cheap per solve at high volume, but you pay the full monthly rate whether you send one request or a million, and unused capacity is gone at month end.

Credits. A middle ground: you buy a bucket of credits, sometimes with an expiry date. Watch the expiry — credits you don't burn in time are just a quiet price increase.

The cost nobody prints: failed solves

This is the big one. Ask any service a single question: do I pay for failed solves?

If a service bills every attempt, your effective price is the quoted rate divided by your success rate. A "$1 per thousand" service that lands 80% of the time actually costs $1.25 per thousand successful tokens, and you feel it most on hard targets where failures cluster. Peak bills only on a successful solve, so the rate quoted is the rate paid — but the rule holds whoever you use: normalize everyone to cost-per-successful-solve, or you're comparing fiction.

The other cost: proxies

Most Cloudflare work needs a proxy, and on the challenges that bind to an IP — the interstitial "5-second" check and its cf_clearance cookie — it needs a sticky residential or mobile one. Proxy bandwidth is a separate bill from your solving spend, and for scraping-heavy jobs it can dwarf the solve cost. Budget for it explicitly instead of getting surprised.

A worked example

Say you need 50,000 successful Turnstile tokens this month. On a pay-per-solve service at $0.90 per 1,000 that bills only on success:

50,000 solves x $0.0009 = $45.00
failed solves:            billed nothing
total solving spend:      $45.00  (+ your proxy bandwidth)

Now the same 50,000 on a service that charges per attempt at the same headline rate, landing 85%:

to get 50,000 successes at 85%, you attempt ~58,800 times
58,800 x $0.0009 = $52.90 for the same 50,000 tokens

Same sticker price, roughly 18% more out of pocket, and the gap widens on harder targets. The number that matters is always cost per successful solve.

How to estimate your bill honestly

• Volume. Successful solves per day, realistically — not your peak hour.
• Billing basis. Per success or per attempt? If per attempt, divide the rate by your real success rate.
• Proxy spend. Estimate bandwidth separately; it's often the larger line.
• Floor and expiry. Any monthly minimum or credit expiry is part of the price.

Put those four numbers together and you have a budget instead of a headline. If you want to test the per-success model against your own numbers, Peak gives roughly 1,000 free solves before you add funds — enough to measure your real success rate on your actual targets, which is the input every estimate above depends on.

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Originally published on the Peak blog.