> free It's not free. It increases friction, and at least in my case, results in abandoned transactions. I'm not well versed in the different options for spam

> free It's not free. It increases friction, and at least in my case, results in abandoned transactions. I'm not well versed in the different options for spam protection (or the attacks) but I do know that most merchants don't make their users solve a puzzle, especially at a critical point along the purchase workflow where is it most likely to get derailed. The fact that google is (probably unintentionally) particularly appealing to small providers or charities, pretending they offer a "free" product, makes it even worse. Edit: not an endorsement, but elsewhere in the discussion someone posted a link to cloudflare's captcha solution, which they say specifically addresses the privacy and annoyingness concerns of Google's captcha. So there are options: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/products/turnstile/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/products/turnstile/ (I'm not actually familiar with this, it may have a downside I don't know about) (Also, disagreeing with something is generally a poor reason to downvote. It's much better to have a discussion, and I appreciate your comment)