Private Captcha The European alternative to Google reCAPTCHA / hCaptcha

Private Captcha is bot protection for web forms and APIs from Estonian Intmaker OÜ. Instead of visible puzzles, the browser solves a cryptographic proof-of-work challenge in the background. The difficulty of the challenge adapts automatically, so legitimate users notice no perceptible difference while bot requests become computationally expensive. Tiers start at 10,000 requests per month.

Private Captcha uses exclusively European providers throughout the stack: Bunny CDN for delivery, Hetzner for compute, and Scaleway for further components. No US cloud services are used. The company is registered as Intmaker OÜ in Estonia and is subject to Estonian and European law. No cookies are set and no personal data is shared with third parties.

Private Captcha sends no data to Google and is GDPR-compliant without user consent. Google reCAPTCHA transmits behavioural data to Google servers in the US and is questionable under Schrems II from a privacy perspective. Private Captcha has no free tier, reCAPTCHA is free up to 10,000 requests per month. With Private Captcha, all features are included in every tier instead of hiding individual features behind enterprise plans.