How to earn from a CAPTCHA API you already use (without solving captchas yourself)

Peak Administrator

— 2 min read

Search for a way to earn from CAPTCHAs and you land in the wrong place: sites offering pennies to sit and type them by hand. That is not what a developer wants. If you build scrapers, bots, or automation that already calls a solver, there is a real way to earn on that work, and it does not involve solving anything yourself. It runs on the API you are already paying.

Can you earn from a CAPTCHA API without solving captchas yourself?

Yes. Modern solvers pay you to route usage to them. You do not touch a CAPTCHA. You either send people their way with a referral link, or you tag your API requests with a developer ID so the provider pays you a share of every solve your code triggers. Both land as account credit you spend on your own solving.

The two ways to earn

There are exactly two mechanisms, and they earn on different things.

A referral link pays when someone signs up through it. You share a link, they register, and you earn a percentage of what they spend from then on. This rewards reach. It fits if you write tutorials, run a channel, or have people who trust your recommendation.

An AppID pays on the request itself. You put an ID in your solve payload, and every solve carrying it earns you a cut, whether you made the call or a user of your tool did. This rewards usage. It fits if you ship code that calls a solver, because the people running it never need to sign up for you to earn.

The AppID is the one most developers miss. It tends to sit in an SDK README while the referral link gets the marketing. If you want the full mechanic, we wrote a separate explainer on AppIDs.

Which should a developer use?

Use both when you can, because they do not overlap.

  • You publish or have an audience: lead with the referral link.
  • You ship a tool, plugin, or bot: lead with the AppID.
  • You do both: run both, and let each earn on what it is good at.

A concrete case. You maintain an open-source Turnstile plugin that a few hundred people install. Most of them will never see your name, let alone click a referral link. But every solve their installs make can carry your AppID. That is usage you were already generating for other people, turned into credit.

How to set it up on Peak

Peak runs both and keeps the numbers plain. Referrals pay 20% of what the people you refer spend. The AppID pays 5% of every solve made through it. Both go to your balance as solve credit.

For the referral link, open Referrals in the dashboard and copy your link. It looks like https://peak.fo/?ref=YOURCODE.

For the AppID, create one under Developer, then add it to your solve payload:

curl -X POST "https://api.peak.fo/solve" \
  -H "X-API-Key: pk_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"task_type":"TurnstileTaskProxyLess","url":"https://example.com/","sitekey":"0x4AAAAAAA...","appId":"app_your_app_id"}'

The appId field is optional and never changes the solve, so you can bake it into your default request and leave it there. The earn section of the docs has the rest.

What the credit is worth

Be clear-eyed about the reward. On Peak this is solve credit, not cash. You spend it on Cloudflare Turnstile and 5s solving. If you are already buying solves, that is a straight discount on usage with nothing to withdraw and no threshold to hit. If you specifically need a cash payout, this is not that, and a cash affiliate program elsewhere would suit you better.

For a developer running steady volume, the credit path is the easy win: it costs you nothing to add, it earns on work you are already doing, and it comes off the top of your next bill. Grab a link under Referrals or an AppID under Developer and you are earning on the next solve.

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