How I Stopped Form Spam Without reCAPTCHA

Google reCAPTCHA started charging after 10k assessments per month. hCaptcha tanks conversion rates with those "click every bus" puzzles. Turnstile locks you into Cloudflare's ecosystem. I got tired of picking between surveillance, vendor lock-in, and a monthly bill just to keep bots off a contact form. So I built a CAPTCHA that uses proof-of-work instead. No tracking. No cookies. No external dependencies. Self-hosted. Here's how it works and how to add it to any site in about five minutes. The Problem With Every CAPTCHA Let's be real about what happened to the CAPTCHA landscape: reCAPTCHA was free for years, and that made it the default. Then Google introduced reCAPTCHA Enterprise pricing and capped the free tier at 10,000 assessments per month. For a side project getting moderate traffic, you're now paying Google to protect a contact form. And the whole time, reCAPTCHA is collecting behavioral data, setting cookies, and phoning home to Google's servers. If you care about GDPR complian