Last month I got a Slack message at 2am from a panicked client: "Nobody can sign up. The form just spins forever." After 30 minutes of digging, the culprit was the little reCAPTCHA badge in the corner. Google's servers were having a bad day in their region, and our entire signup funnel was held hostage by a third-party script. That wasn't the first time. It was the third in six months. So I finally did what I'd been putting off — ripped reCAPTCHA out and replaced it with something I could actually control. This post walks through why reCAPTCHA fails in production, how to diagnose the symptoms, and the concrete steps I took to replace it without flooding the database with bot signups.…