Captcha Solver - How to Monetize?

Hi all,

I have been scrapping a website to take statistics about something, but they recently added a captcha, so I wrote a program to solve the captcha. It turned out to be really difficult to solve automatically, but after many hours of research and coding it's working now.

The thing is this. I just read an article by the company that develops this captcha, and they claim to have many (2500+) paid users. The license for a single domain costs around $250 plus $150/year. Assuming all those clients paid the cheapest license they sell, we're talking about a $625k one-time payment plus $375k/year business.

I found a list of their biggest clients and I was amazed. Some of the biggest private companies (Fortune 100) and some of the most important governments (including the US) are using this captcha on some of their websites, and probably paying way more than what I mentioned above. It seems their success is due to some regulatory requirements that they meet, but other captcha companies don't.

I thought about contacting the captcha company to sell them the solver I developed. They may be interested for two reasons. First, to understand the weaknesses of their captcha system and improve it, and also so I don't do anything stupid with it and they lose their credibility and probably more money than what I ask for it.

Some questions for you.

- How much money do you think it is worth for them?
- Are you interested in buying this yourself? What for?
- Can you think of any other way to monetize this project?

Some things to consider. First of all, I won't mention what captcha company it is or any of their clients. Secondly, I'm not interested in spamming or selling cheap products using this on an email scrapping tool, I would rather sell this as it is. Thirdly, I'm aware of those pages that solve captchas using cheap human workers, they do a much better job because this solver is specialized in only one captcha company, so I don't think the owners of those pages would be interested in buying this solver.

Any other insight you can provide is greatly appreciated.

Best,
Matt

- How much money do you think it is worth for them?
$0 unless you're talking about a vulnerability that allows you to bypass the captcha altogether. AKA, not just running it through an OCR or something along those lines.

- Are you interested in buying this yourself? What for?
Assuming it's a bypass, you'd actually have to provide more information before anyone can decide if it's worth something to them.

- Can you think of any other way to monetize this project?
Captchas are easy to break, so probably not unless it's widely used by relevant targets.

I don't understand your answer, please explain further why you think it's worth $0 unless it exploits a vulnerability.

Also, I don't see why you think captchas are "easy to break". Have you done that yourself or just guessing?

The easiest way is paying for this, and the cheapest I've seen is something like 50 cents 1000 codes (human workers). If you want to scrap 50k pages every day, that's $750 a month. It sums up depending on your scale. Any easier or cheaper than that?

mattzoing said:

I don't understand your answer, please explain further why you think it's worth $0 unless it exploits a vulnerability.

Also, I don't see why you think captchas are "easy to break". Have you done that yourself or just guessing?

The easiest way is paying for this, and the cheapest I've seen is something like 50 cents 1000 codes (human workers). If you want to scrap 50k pages every day, that's $750 a month. It sums up depending on your scale. Any easier or cheaper than that?

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You claim to have solved it in hours, so that should've been a good indicator of how much it would be worth.

I didn't mention specifically how much time I put into this, but it wasn't easy at all. It's one of the more complex captchas I know of. Also, time doesn't relate to difficulty (and worth) if you don't consider coding expertise and experience doing data analysis.

You developed it to allow you to scrape data freely so I reckon the worth of your solver is equal to the value of the data you have access to.

Why not just keep using your secret solver for your own data scraping project.

Eventually vulnerabilities will be patched.

mattzoing said:

I didn't mention specifically how much time I put into this, but it wasn't easy at all. It's one of the more complex captchas I know of. Also, time doesn't relate to difficulty if you don't consider coding expertise and experience doing data analysis.

Click to expand...

Sure. At the end of the day, it's most likely worth nothing (to the company atleast). No matter how "complex" it is, captcha breaking is always straightforward, and no service is stupid enough to guarantee anything more than an inconvenience.

Also, "human solvers" have been put out of business for a long time now.

i also guess they will not buy it ...... they know that there captchas can be broken. so its no news to them .....