Private Captcha

Private Captcha is a bot-protection service from Intmaker OÜ, a small, independent, bootstrapped company in Estonia. It replaces the visual puzzle with a proof-of-work challenge whose difficulty scales with how suspicious the traffic looks, so a visitor is not asked to pick traffic lights. The widget is a drop-in snippet, and the service states that it uses no cookies, no tracking and no fingerprinting, with endpoints that stay inside the EU.

Like Friendly Captcha on this page, it does the same job: it removes the Google request that reCAPTCHA puts on every form, using the same proof-of-work approach. The differences are commercial. Every tier includes every feature and the price follows request volume, from €19 a month for 1,000 requests up to 1,000,000, with a 14-day trial that needs no card. Self-hosting is offered too: the source is on GitHub, free for non-commercial use and licensed for commercial use.

The honest limits are those of a young, small vendor. We found no certification or audit report on the pages we checked, and the self-hosting licence is source-available rather than open source in the usual sense, so mCaptcha is the pick if open source is a requirement. Buyers who want a managed service from a named EU company, a trial and a clear price list will find it a straightforward alternative.

What Private Captcha does well

• Proof-of-work challenge, no puzzle for visitors
• EU-only endpoints and EU hosting
• Every feature in every tier, priced by request volume
• 14-day free trial without a card
• Self-hosting licence available

Where Private Captcha falls short

• Small, bootstrapped vendor with a short track record
• No certification or audit report found on the pages we checked
• Self-hosting licence is source-available, not open source
• No free managed plan after the 14-day trial

Standout feature. A proof-of-work CAPTCHA from Estonia that sells every feature in every tier and prices only by request volume.