Shield
Pricing
This is the shortest pricing page we have: Shield is free. No verification caps, no widget limits, no plans, no card. Forever.
Free forever. Not free-until-you-grow.
reCAPTCHA charges once you pass 10,000 assessments a month. hCaptcha holds its best detection back for enterprise. Shield's core protection — verifications, scores, all widget modes — has no caps and no paid gate, at any scale.
Why? Shield is how we introduce developers to Edge. If it wins your trust for bot protection, we'd love to earn your CDN, DNS, or compute workloads too — but that's entirely optional, and Shield never requires it. Optional paid extras (advanced analytics, enterprise support) come later; the protection itself stays free.
Shield Free
The rate card
Nothing you need to protect your site costs anything. The only paid items are optional extras — and they don't exist yet.
| Resource | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Verifications Challenges, solves & siteverify calls | Free unlimited | Fair-use protected against abuse of the service itself |
| Widgets & sitekeys Per account | Free unlimited | Create one per site, form, or environment |
| Humanity score 1–100 on every siteverify response | Free | Included — not an enterprise upsell |
| Basic analytics Hourly challenge, solve & score metrics | Free | Included with every widget |
| Advanced analytics Extended retention, exports, alerting | Coming later | Optional paid add-on — core protection stays free |
| Enterprise support & SLA Dedicated support, custom rules, WAF integration | Coming later | Optional — contact us if you need this now |
Free, compared
"Free" means different things to different providers. Here's what it means for each.
| Feature | Edge Shield | Turnstile | reCAPTCHA | hCaptcha |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, unlimited | Free (10 widgets) | Free to 10k/mo, then paid | Free tier, paid pro |
| Confidence score | 1–100 on every call | | 0.0–1.0 (v3) | Enterprise only |
| Visual puzzles | Never | Never | Yes (v2 fallback) | Yes |
| Ad-tech tracking | | | | |
| Per-visitor data stored | | | | |
| Open-source widget | | | | |
Competitor details based on publicly listed plans and may change — see the full comparison.
Pricing FAQ
The questions everyone asks about a free product.
Is it really free? What's the catch?
Core protection is free forever, with no verification caps. Shield exists to introduce developers to Edge — we monetise optional extras later (advanced analytics, enterprise support, WAF integration), never the protection itself.
Do I need a credit card?
No. Create an account, create a widget, and you have a sitekey and secret. There is nothing to subscribe to and nothing that expires.
Are there rate limits?
Only abuse protection on the service itself — generous per-IP limits that legitimate websites will never encounter. There are no monthly assessment quotas like reCAPTCHA's 10,000-call cap.
How does this compare to Turnstile?
Turnstile is also free, but it doesn't expose a confidence score and it ties you into the Cloudflare ecosystem. Shield gives you a 1–100 humanity score on every verification, runs on independent infrastructure, and is a drop-in replacement — same siteverify response shape.
What happens if my site gets a traffic spike?
Nothing — that's the point. Shield runs on dedicated Edge infrastructure built for unbounded public traffic, and challenges are stateless so they scale horizontally. Your bill stays at zero either way.
The price is zero. The setup is five minutes.
Unlimited bot protection with a humanity score on every verification. No card, no caps, no catch.