Terms of service

This agreement is between you — the company, organisation or sole trader opening the account — and the legal entity operating CaptchAPI. That entity's registered name, address, company registration number and VAT number are published on the contact page and form part of these terms.

By creating an account, generating an API key or sending a request to the API, you accept these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

The acceptable use policy, the privacy policy and the refund policy are part of this agreement. Where a specific policy conflicts with these general terms, the specific policy governs its own subject matter.

CaptchAPI is a business-to-business service. Accounts are opened by companies, organisations and professionals acting in the course of their trade. We do not knowingly contract with consumers, and the consumer protections of EU and national consumer law are not intended to apply.

Where we nevertheless grant a right that mirrors a consumer right — the fourteen-day credit refund window in the refund policy, for example — we grant it contractually, as a commercial choice, not because we are obliged to.

You are responsible for everything done with your account and your API keys, including by your employees, contractors and anything you have automated. A key is a bearer credential with a spendable balance attached: whoever holds it can create tasks and spend your funds.

We store only a SHA-256 hash of each key together with a short display prefix. We cannot recover a lost key, and no member of our team can read yours. If a key leaks, disable it in the dashboard — the change takes effect on the next request.

You must keep your account details accurate, particularly the billing email, because it is where invoices and service notices are sent.

• Do not embed an API key in client-side code, a mobile app or a public repository.
• Use a separate key per environment and per service so a single revocation does not stop everything.
• Tell us promptly if you believe a key has been compromised, so we can look for misuse alongside you.

CaptchAPI accepts a task describing a CAPTCHA challenge and attempts to produce a token or a cookie bundle for it. The API contract, the supported task types and the error codes are documented publicly and form the specification of what we deliver.

We do not promise that any particular challenge, sitekey or target will be solvable, or that a solution we return will be accepted by the target. CAPTCHA providers change their systems continuously, and a target may reject a valid token for reasons entirely outside our control — an IP reputation signal, a rate limit, a behavioural model or a change deployed while your task was running.

Latency figures published on this site are measurements, not commitments. They are honest about the conditions they were taken under and they are not a service level agreement.

You must comply with the acceptable use policy at all times. In short: you may only use CaptchAPI against systems you own, or that you are authorised in writing to test. That restriction is fundamental to this agreement, not a formality, and a breach of it is a material breach of these terms.

You are responsible for the lawfulness of your own activity, including under the laws that apply to you, the terms of the systems you interact with, and any proxy or network you route through us. We supply a solving capability; we do not supply proxies, we do not select your targets, and we do not review your purpose in advance.

The service is prepaid. You buy credit, credit is debited when a task is created, and the debit is reversed automatically when a task fails. Prices per thousand solves are published on the pricing page and may change with thirty days' notice; changes never apply retroactively to credit already spent.

Volume discounts are applied automatically at debit time according to lifetime spend. There is no minimum spend, no subscription and no seat licence.

Prices are stated in US dollars and exclude VAT. Where VAT applies, it is added at the applicable rate, or the reverse charge is applied for EU businesses that supply a valid VAT identification number. You are responsible for the accuracy of the tax details you give us.

Balances are held internally as integer micro-dollars so that rounding cannot accumulate for or against either party.

We aim for continuous availability and publish live latency, success rate and queue figures on the status page, drawn from the same monitoring our own alerting uses. We do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee or service credits; if you need one, contact us before you build a critical dependency on the service.

We may perform maintenance that briefly interrupts the service. Where an interruption is planned and material, we give advance notice by email to accounts with recent traffic.

Support is provided by email in French and English, with a target of one working day for a first response. Reports of a service-wide failure are prioritised over everything else.

You may stop using the service at any time and close your account from the dashboard. Unused credit is handled under the refund policy.

We may suspend a key or an account immediately where we reasonably believe there is a breach of the acceptable use policy, a security compromise, fraudulent payment activity, or a legal obligation requiring it. Where circumstances allow, we tell you what triggered the suspension and what would resolve it.

We may terminate this agreement on thirty days' notice for convenience, or immediately for a material breach that is not cured within seven days of us asking. On termination for any reason other than your breach of the acceptable use policy, unused credit is refunded.

We own the service, the software behind it, the documentation and the CaptchAPI marks. You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the API for the term of this agreement, and nothing more.

You own your data, your integration code and anything you build with the tokens we return. We claim no rights over them.

You may state publicly that you use CaptchAPI. We will not use your name or logo as a reference without your written permission.

Each party will keep the other's non-public information confidential and use it only for the purposes of this agreement. That obligation survives termination by three years.

It does not apply to information that is public through no fault of the receiving party, was already lawfully known, is independently developed, or must be disclosed by law — in which case the disclosing party is told first, where that is lawful.

We warrant that we will provide the service with reasonable skill and care, in accordance with its published documentation. That is the extent of what we warrant.

Beyond that, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided as-is. We exclude all implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose, uninterrupted availability, and any guarantee of success rate or solve time for a given target.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business opportunity, or loss or corruption of data, however caused.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the total amount you paid us in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim. Where you have paid us nothing in that period, our liability is limited to one hundred US dollars.

This allocation of risk is reflected in the price. A service sold per thousand solves cannot carry the liability of the business processes built on top of it, and you are better placed than we are to design around a failed solve.

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your use of the service in breach of the acceptable use policy or of applicable law, including claims brought by the operator of a system you targeted without authorisation.

We will tell you promptly of any such claim, will not settle it without your consent, and will let you control the defence at your cost.

Each party acts as an independent controller for the personal data it processes under this agreement. We process your account and billing data as described in the privacy policy.

We do not process personal data on your behalf as a processor in the ordinary course, because the API takes challenge parameters rather than personal data. If your integration causes personal data to be sent to us, you must tell us, and we will put a data processing agreement in place before you continue.

We develop the service continuously and may add, change or remove features. Where a change to the API is not backwards compatible, we give at least thirty days' notice and, where practical, keep the previous behaviour available during that period.

We may change these terms. Material changes are notified by email to the billing address on the account at least thirty days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that date is acceptance; if you do not accept, stop using the service and ask for your unused credit back.

Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by an event beyond its reasonable control, including infrastructure failure at a hosting or network provider, denial-of-service attack, state action, or a fundamental change imposed by a third-party CAPTCHA vendor that makes a family unsolvable.

If such an event lasts more than thirty days, either party may terminate this agreement and unused credit is refunded.

You may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to a successor of our business on notice to you.

If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest stands and the provision is read down to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable.

A failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it. These terms, with the policies they incorporate, are the entire agreement between us and replace any prior discussion or proposal.

Notices to you are sent to the billing email on your account. Notices to us go to the address published on the contact page.

This agreement is governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which the CaptchAPI entity is established, and the courts of that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. The specific country, and the competent court, will be stated here once the entity is incorporated.

Before starting proceedings, both parties agree to raise the issue in writing and to allow thirty days for a good-faith attempt to resolve it. Most disputes about an API are really disputes about a number, and a number can usually be checked.