When I moved to Google Chrome last year, meaning WebVisum was no longer an option, my only option for captcha solving was $1. But I ran out of Credits there yesterday, so figured it was time to see if the landscape had changed. And it had! We chrome users now have 3 workable options to solve CAPTCHAs. My thoughts on all three follow. These are early days, and I only tried 1 or 2 sites with every program but Rumola, that I've used for about a year. So I'll update this if/when my thoughts change.

$1: The classic. Has been around for Firefox forever, and Chrome for a while, too. At $0.99 for 50 CAPTCHAs, it's the most expensive option by far! Unfortunately, that price doesn't come with any extra speed or reliability, that I can tell. Don't get me wrong: it works most of the time. It's just no faster or more reliable than any of the other options. So why pay more? Also, it has an annoying option that will automatically search for and solve CAPTCHAs on every page you load. This is a privacy issue, as it means every page gets sent to Rumola's servers. Also, it can mean you waste your credits when it solves a CAPTCHA that had an audio alternative. Thankfully, you can disable that option, and all is well.

$1: At $3 a month for unlimitted CAPTCHA solving, this competes well on price. However, apparently this is a limited time introduction price, so we'll have to see what the real price becomes. There are a few bugs at the moment in the chrome extension, but nothing that will actually prevent you from solving CAPTCHAs! I didn't test the Firefox or Internet Explorer extensions; but the issue in chrome is just a small UI problem (the icon on the menu bar doesn't work) that I doubt exists anywhere else. Follow the given instructions, and you should be fine. Solving CAPTCHAs works similarly to Rumola, and seems about as fast. The only difference is instead of hearing a voice tell you when the CAPTCHA is on your clipboard, you here a small sound. As for reliability, I've only tested one site here, so it's early days. But it seems to work fine.

$1: This service uses real human CAPTCHA solvers, unlike the other two. Strangely, it's also cheaper! It comes in at about a buck for a thousand images. However, you really need to no what you're doing. First off, when you want to solve a captcha, you need to right click on the image, and mark it as the captcha source. Then you need to right click on the text box, and select it as the captcha destination. None of this will be handled for you. Also, instead of logging in to the extension with a username and password, you need to fiddle around with API keys. Second, the company is out of a country that seems to have trouble processing international payments. The best way to pay is bitcoin; otherwise, you need to give unknown Romanian third parties your credit card to purchase "refill codes" that you then need to enter on the anti-captcha website. However, once you spend the hour or so to get it running, it does work. Both CAPTCHAs I tried were solved slightly faster than the other two services. If your primary concern is price, and you don't care how user friendly it is, anti-captcha is the way to go.

What are other folks using to solve CAPTCHAs, these days? Does anyone else have experience with any of these services?