Having written code to bypass captchas, up to and including Google ReCaptcha: yes, there is a difference. A large difference. $5 per request is not a negligibl

Having written code to bypass captchas, up to and including Google ReCaptcha: yes, there is a difference. A large difference. $5 per request is not a negligible amount of money. In practice it doesn't cost anywhere near that amount to call a MechanicalTurk API which will solve ReCaptcha for you. But it's still significant for any nontrivial number of requests, such as in the use case of scraping. You should adjust your priors here. You're focused on the narrow case where a win condition is achieved by spending n dollars to solve a single instance of ReCaptcha. People who use ReCaptcha are (in my professional experience) overwhelmingly more focused on requiring ReCaptcha to be solved for every individual request of a given type. I have been in the position you speak of, where I had a revolving set of IP addresses, requesting servers and user agents, and $5 per request would have immediately shut my operation down. As it was, the actual ~$0.15 per request to solve ReCaptcha was sufficiently significant that I couldn't curate enough data for what I needed, despite having all the other resources you mention.