Network Programming in .NET

If you use CapMonster Cloud, then you may find that the per-request pricing does add up over high volumes, if you have spare computing power, then you can run CapMonster Hosted on your own server., or if you are running a batch-process on your own local PC, then this could be a big cost saver.

It’s not free, since you need to buy a license from CapMonster for the base sofware, I used the Lite version for $37, available here: https://zennolab.com/en/products/capmonster/#section_price – Then you also need the sitekey add on, which is $10 per month, available here; https://zennolab.com/wiki/en:addons:capmonster:sitekey – But this now allows you solve 100,000 captchas per day, instead of the $0.6 * 100 = $60 per day cost of the equivalent on CapMonster Cloud at the same volume.

So, After downloading the required software, it will start a server on 127.0.0.3 (port 80) by default that exposes the same API as capmonster.cloud – but obviously with a differnt endpoint (local vs remote).

The problem is that if you use the NuGet Package here; https://www.nuget.org/packages/CapMonsterCloud then you will notice that this does not offer the API endpoint to be configurable.

What I did was clone the repo from https://github.com/mboukhlouf/CapMonsterCloud and then set then change the ApiBaseUrl specified in Endpoints.cs – or make it a public property, and modify it in your client code.

So, this could be a good cost saving tip, for heavy users of CapMonster.