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Friendly Captcha
Company blog · friendlycaptcha.com/insights · on HN as protoductionsecurityweb
Friendly Captcha is the company blog at friendlycaptcha.com, writing about security and web. Since 2020, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Friendly Captcha – user-friendly CAPTCHA”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
59mentions?
17HN people?
2020–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers point to Friendly Captcha as a privacy-friendly, proof-of-work alternative to reCAPTCHA for stopping bots and spam, often as a GDPR-friendly, self-hostable option.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Friendly Captcha is a privacy-compliant, accessible alternative to traditional CAPTCHAs. It protects your websites and apps from bots and spam.
Most-linked posts?
- Friendly Captcha – user-friendly CAPTCHA13 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2020-07-15
- /privacy/gdpr/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-22
What Hacker News says?
Hi phikai, I built a privacy friendly alternative to ReCaptcha called FriendlyCaptcha [1], is there a possibility to see this integrated as a more user friendly alternative? Happy to chat (e-mail in profile) [1] https://friendlycaptcha.com/
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on “Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab”Submitted Show HN: FriendlyCaptcha – a privacy friendly proof-of-work based CAPTCHA as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI built an alternative[0] that takes a proof of work approach. As a site owner you set the difficulty that makes sense for you: so perhaps you would want 20 seconds of computation before you can submit. The nice thing is that this can happen entirely in the background while the user fills in the form. Also with multiple requests from the same IP in a short timespan, the difficulty increases. There are downsides to t…
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on “hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet”Submitted Friendly Captcha – user-friendly CAPTCHA as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFriendly Captcha | Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)”Submitted Friendly Captcha – GDPR-Compliant Bot Protection as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFriendly Captcha | Integrations Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every day…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)”Submitted Show HN: FriendlyCaptcha – a privacy friendly proof-of-work based CAPTCHA as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFriendly Captcha | DevOps / Infra Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)”Submitted Friendly Captcha – GDPR Compliant Bot Protection as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAn IP address being used in the course of providing the service is not surveillance. That's like saying "Amazon knowing where to ship my package is surveillance." It's a bad argument, in my opinion. Regardless, consider a DDoS attack. If every new request is coming from a different IP address, how do you continue providing service to your legitimate customers while blocking that malicious attack? Knowing the attacke…
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on “Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising”Submitted Controlling Variance in Proof-of-Work Algorithms as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFriendly Captcha | Backend and DevOps Engineers | REMOTE (EU) | FULL-TIME, PART-TIME or FREELANCE | Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We are building privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We’re a small, growing, profitable c…
Comment linking /company/jobs/apply/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)”Submitted Friendly Captcha as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFriendly Captcha | Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2024)”https://friendlycaptcha.com/ Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange. Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.
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on “Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does”> You can't claim "working on it" - which is not even what you are claiming. I can, actually. :) I'm part of the team at https://friendlycaptcha.com/ and we agree that most CAPTCHAs suck. But we also believe that these issues can be improved, if not outright solved—at least the UX aspects. I was doing my best to avoid bringing up my employment, since these are my own opinions and I didn't want to promote anything, b…
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on “Bots, so many bots”I’m the co-founder of Friendly Captcha [0], we offer a proof of work-based captcha since two years or so. Happy to answer any questions. A big part of what makes our captcha successful in fighting abuse is that we scale the difficulty of the proof-of-work puzzle based on the user’s previous behavior and other signals (e.g. minus points if their IP address is a known datacenter IP). The nice thing about a scaling PoW…
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on “Botspam apocalypse”Friendly Captcha | Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2024)”Friendly Captcha | DevOps Engineer & Integrations Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2024)”FYI, the "Job openings" box in the careers page is blank: https://friendlycaptcha.com/company/jobs/ . It would be friendlier to say there's none available :) Edit: also, when applying, the resume file picker is not quite right on the phone. It did let me select a file, but I was also given the option to take a photo or record audio. Other forms I've seen directly asked for a file.
Comment linking /company/jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)”Friendly Captcha | Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)”Friendly Captcha | Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every da…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2024)”Friendly Captcha ( https://friendlycaptcha.com ) | Remote, EU timezone | Part-time or hourly basis | Full-stack developer We are a small, profitable company providing a privacy-friendly and accessible alternative to Google ReCAPTCHA based on proof of work. We are looking for a fullstack developer to help us further improve our anti-spam tools that don't carry an accessibility and privacy cost to end-users. The ideal…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)”I'm the technical founder of FriendlyCaptcha [1], a privacy friendly proof of work alternative to reCaptcha that doesn't suck for end users (and also doesn't need any tracking or cookies so legal/compliance teams like it too). While not a one-man company anymore, I've been the only engineer of it for a long time that I think it qualifies :) * We use cloudflare workers for our API endpoints which have given us amazin…
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on “Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?”Friendly Captcha | Data Engineer - Bot Protection | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better e…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)”Friendly Captcha | Data Engineer - Bot Protection | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better e…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)”Friendly Captcha | Software Engineer | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better every day by w…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)”Friendly Captcha | Data Engineer - Bot Protection | REMOTE within EU | PART-TIME or FULL-TIME | Office in Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We provide privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants. We make the internet a bit better e…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025)”Also, as a general aside to web devs, if we need captchas, can we at least use something less obnoxious and more privacy friendly, like: https://friendlycaptcha.com/ I put this on my signup form and have had zero spam since, and it has very little impact on user experience. The fact that it doesn't feed the google surveillance machine is a bonus.
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on “Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39”
