capsolver pricing 2026: what you actually pay per 1,000 solves

capsolver charges $0.80 per 1,000 solves for recaptcha v2 and v3, $0.80 for cloudflare turnstile, $0.95 for hcaptcha, $1.40 for datadome, and $0.50 for image captchas in 2026. there’s no monthly subscription. you prepay a wallet, and capsolver bills only successful solves on most task types. volume discounts kick in above $100 in monthly spend. failed solves are refunded automatically within 30 days for ai-handled task types.

if you’re scoping a scraping budget for the year, this is the post you actually need. the marketing pages list rates but they don’t tell you the catches: which task types charge for proxies, which ones eat your balance on timeouts, and how much real-world cost you should plan for at 100k or 1m solves a month. this guide breaks the numbers down with the gotchas included.

the headline rates

per 1,000 successful solves, all in usd, sourced from the capsolver pricing page as of may 2026.

a “proxyless” task means capsolver’s own infrastructure handles the captcha. “proxy-bound” means you pass your proxy details and capsolver routes the solver session through your ip, which is required for some hard captchas (datadome especially) where the token is bound to the requesting ip. the markup is roughly 30-50% above proxyless.

what counts as a successful solve

capsolver only bills tasks that return a usable token. a few specifics worth knowing.

• timeouts (no answer within 120 seconds) are not charged.
• errors from your side (invalid sitekey, malformed url) are not charged.
• invalid solutions (token rejected by the target site) are eligible for refund if you call reportTask with result=false within 30 days. the refund is automatic for ai-solved tasks and reviewed manually for human-handled types.

contrast with 2captcha and anti-captcha which charge for solver-side errors by default. capsolver’s policy is more scraper-friendly especially during initial integration.

how billing actually works

capsolver uses a prepaid wallet model. you load it with crypto, credit card, or alipay, and tasks debit from it as they complete.

• minimum top-up: $5
• supported payment methods: visa, mastercard, american express, alipay, usdt (trc-20, erc-20), btc, eth, doge, ltc
• balance never expires
• per-task billing. no daily or monthly limits.

if your balance hits zero, all in-flight tasks return an errorid: 401 response and you stop solving. set up a balance-low alert via their api or webhook.

import requests
balance = requests.post("https://api.capsolver.com/getBalance", json={
    "clientKey": "your-key",
}).json()
print(balance["balance"])

volume discounts in 2026

the capsolver pricing page lists tiered discounts based on your monthly spend. as of mid-2026:

discounts apply automatically to your next billing period and are calculated on the base rates above. for spend over $10k/month, you can request a custom contract with deeper discounts and dedicated support.

real cost estimates by use case

useful to think in terms of what your actual bill looks like.

a small price-monitoring scraper.
1,000 product pages a day. about 20% need a turnstile bypass, so 200 solves/day, 6,000/month. at $0.80/1k turnstile, that’s $4.80/month. your bottleneck will be proxy cost, not solver cost.

a mid-size lead-gen scraper.
50,000 contact pages a day across various sites. say 30% protected by recaptcha v2. that’s 15,000 solves/day, 450,000/month. at $0.80/1k that’s $360/month. with the 5-10% volume discount, $325-340. still cheap relative to the proxy and engineer time.

a high-volume serp/social scraper.
1m google or social pages a day, 10% protected by recaptcha v3. that’s 100,000/day, 3m/month. at $0.80/1k that’s $2,400/month. with the 15% volume discount, $2,040. that scales linearly. negotiate a custom rate at this point.

a datadome-heavy travel scraper.
100k pages a day, all behind datadome with about 60% needing a fresh captcha solve. that’s 60k/day, 1.8m/month. at $1.40/1k proxyless, $2,520/month. proxy-bound is required for datadome reliability, so $2,100k * $2.10 = $3,780/month. add proxy cost on top.

solver cost rarely dominates a serious scraping budget. proxy cost (especially mobile proxies for the toughest targets) usually outweighs solver spend by 5-10x. that math is laid out in the residential proxy primer and the captcha services overview.

proxy-bound vs proxyless tasks

worth a deeper look because this is where people overspend.

proxyless is the default. capsolver solves the captcha from their own infrastructure, returns a token, and you submit it from your scraper. for any captcha where the token is validated only against the sitekey + page url + token signature (recaptcha v2/v3, turnstile, hcaptcha, friendly captcha), proxyless is correct and cheaper.

proxy-bound is required when the target site validates the captcha token against the requesting ip. datadome does this. some recaptcha enterprise deployments do this. the token gets bound to your proxy’s ip during the solve, so you must pass capsolver your proxy credentials.

if you’re not sure, start proxyless. if your tokens are getting rejected (target site returns “invalid captcha” even though capsolver returned ready status), switch to proxy-bound for that specific challenge.

import requests

# proxy-bound recaptcha v2
task = {
    "type": "ReCaptchaV2Task",
    "websiteURL": "https://example.com",
    "websiteKey": "6Le-...",
    "proxyType": "http",
    "proxyAddress": "residential-proxy.example.com",
    "proxyPort": 8080,
    "proxyLogin": "user",
    "proxyPassword": "pass",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36",
}
result = requests.post("https://api.capsolver.com/createTask", json={
    "clientKey": "your-capsolver-key",
    "task": task,
}).json()

refund policy details

capsolver’s refund flow is simpler than most. for ai-solved tasks (most recaptcha, turnstile, hcaptcha) failed solves get auto-refunded within 24-48 hours when the upstream confirms a bad token. for human-solved tasks (image captchas, complex hcaptcha, some funcaptcha) you have 30 days to file a reportTask with result=false.

requests.post("https://api.capsolver.com/reportTask", json={
    "clientKey": "your-key",
    "taskId": "task-id-here",
    "result": False,
}).json()

practical advice: integrate the reportTask call into your scraper. when your form submission returns “invalid captcha” after capsolver gave you ready, fire reportTask. you get the credit back without touching support. across a year of scraping, this saves a measurable amount.

comparing total cost vs alternatives

capsolver is consistently the cheapest. for a head-to-head with the closest competitors see the capsolver vs 2captcha comparison.

hidden costs to plan for

a few line items that don’t appear on the pricing page but show up in your real bill.

failed-token retries. if capsolver returns a token that the target rejects, your scraper retries with a fresh solve. budget 5-10% on top of the headline rate for retries even after refunds.

proxy costs for proxy-bound tasks. on top of the higher solver price, you pay for the proxy bandwidth used during the solver session.

enterprise upsell. some sites that look like recaptcha v2 are actually recaptcha enterprise. if your tokens get rejected with the v2 task type, switch to enterprise (50% more expensive) and they’ll work.

chrome extension solving. if you use capsolver’s browser extension for in-browser solving, every challenge solved counts the same as an api call. fine for testing, expensive at scale.

faq

how do i pay for capsolver?
prepaid wallet. top up with credit card, alipay, or major crypto (usdt, btc, eth, ltc, doge). minimum $5 top-up.

does capsolver charge for failed solves?
not for ai-solved task types. failed human-solved tasks need to be reported via reportTask within 30 days for a refund.

what’s the cheapest captcha solver in 2026?
capsolver leads on most types. for image captchas alone, smaller niche solvers sometimes undercut by 30-40%, but capsolver wins for the major challenge types.

is there a free trial for capsolver?
yes. free credits ($0.10-$1 depending on promotion) when you create a new account. enough to test 100-1000 solves before committing.

can i set spend limits?
not directly via the dashboard. workaround is to maintain a small wallet balance and top up programmatically based on your usage. enterprise contracts include hard daily caps.

what’s the typical solve time for capsolver?
recaptcha v2: 8-15 seconds. turnstile: 5-10. hcaptcha: 10-20. datadome: 12-25. ai-handled types are consistently fastest.

conclusion

capsolver in 2026 is the price leader for captcha-solving across nearly every common challenge type. $0.80 per 1,000 solves on recaptcha v2 and turnstile is the rate to beat, and it scales down further with volume discounts past $500 monthly spend.

build the wallet alert. integrate the reportTask refund flow. start proxyless and only flip to proxy-bound when you need it. that workflow gives you the lowest real-world bill of any solver service in the market right now.

if you’re shopping solvers, this is your default. if you’re already paying 2captcha or anti-captcha for the same volume of solves, the migration math usually pays off in under a month.