[dimmke]

Agreed on all points. That's why I said in my original comment: "I know these get used for more than [contact] form submissions, to stop bot sign ups etc…"

I picked up Akismet because it's been around forever, and while it is paid, it is very cheap for my use case.

This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like Automattic is sitting on several companies/products and not doing a whole lot with them.

Akismet could be expanded into a more fully featured server side spam detection SAAS with a flexible API etc...

Gravatar could be expanded into something like OpenID.

Just seems like a waste to me.