[_nickwhite]

From the article:

"We evaluated a number of CAPTCHA vendors as well as building a system ourselves."

and

"We worked with hCAPTCHA in two ways. First, we are in the process of leveraging our Workers platform to bear much of the technical load of the CAPTCHAs and, in doing so, reduce their costs. And, second, we proposed that rather than them paying us we pay them. This ensured they had the resources to scale their service to meet our needs. While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And, in exchange, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team."

So Cloudflare are basically cloud hosting hCAPTCHA's services. I wonder why Cloudflare didn't just buy them, as it seems like it would be a win-win with getting an excellent CAPTCHA service, and not have to build it themselves?

[IAmEveryone]

CF likes the CAPTCHA part of CAPTCHAS, but any vendor is probably far more invested in the "generating ML training data" scheme.

CF probably has zero interest in that part of the product: It doesn't fit with their existing products nor customers, and it's just too small relative to their other business to devote much attention to it.

At the same time, the business opportunity is probably too large for hCAPTCHA's founders to just forget about it, or for CF to compensate them on the hot-new-technology assumption when they're only looking for peace-of-mind-utility tech.

[dathinab]

At the end they mention that there long term goal is to eliminate captchas fully if possible.

[beojan]

I suspect that might happen eventually.