# Introduction

ALTCHA Cloud is a fully managed bot protection service for websites and applications. It defends your forms, logins, and APIs against automated abuse while staying invisible to the people who matter — your legitimate users. Under the hood, it is powered by [ALTCHA Sentinel](/docs/sentinel/), ALTCHA's adaptive protection engine.

Hosted entirely in the EU, ALTCHA Cloud is built for organizations that need dependable bot protection together with strong privacy guarantees, GDPR alignment, and accessibility compliance — without running any infrastructure themselves.

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![Cloud Dashboard](/screens/en/cloud/cloud-dashboard-01.png)
      
<figcaption>ALTCHA Cloud Dashboard</figcaption>

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## Why ALTCHA Cloud?

### Privacy-first by design

No user accounts, no personal data collection, no tracking. Visitors prove they are human without handing over any information about themselves, and your organization stays on the right side of data protection regulations by default.

### Invisible to legitimate users

Most real visitors never see a challenge at all. Instead of forcing everyone through visual puzzles, ALTCHA Cloud applies adaptive protection — additional verification is triggered only when traffic looks suspicious, keeping the experience frictionless for everyone else.

### Advanced, adaptive protection

ALTCHA Cloud combines adaptive CAPTCHA with real-time threat intelligence from [ALTCHA Sentinel](/docs/sentinel/). Protection strengthens automatically in response to attack patterns, so you get robust defense without manual tuning.

### EU-hosted with data residency

All infrastructure runs inside the European Union, with EU-only endpoints available. This helps organizations meet local data residency requirements out of the box.

## Compliance-ready

ALTCHA Cloud is designed to support:

- [GDPR compliance](/legal/compliance/gdpr/)
- [WCAG AA and European Accessibility Act (EAA) accessibility compliance](/legal/compliance/wcag/)
- Privacy-focused deployments with no reliance on cookies or fingerprinting

## How it works

1. **Add your site** — register the website or application you want to protect in the Cloud dashboard.
2. **Integrate the widget** — drop the ALTCHA widget into your forms and verify submissions server-side. The [Quick Start](/docs/cloud/quick-start/) guide walks you through it step by step.
3. **Let adaptive protection do the rest** — ALTCHA Cloud evaluates traffic in real time and challenges only suspicious requests.
4. **Monitor from the dashboard** — review analytics, logs, and threat activity at a glance.

## Plans at a glance

All plans share the same core features and compliance standards — they differ only in the number of sites and API capacity:

- **Cloud** — up to 3 sites per account
- **Cloud Plus** — up to 10 sites and 10× the API capacity
- **Cloud Max** — up to 50 sites and 20× the API capacity

Every plan includes a 30-day free trial. See [Pricing](/pricing/) for full details.

## Next steps

- **[Quick Start](/docs/cloud/quick-start/)** — integrate ALTCHA Cloud in minutes
- **[Pricing](/pricing/)** — compare plans and start your free trial
- **[ALTCHA Sentinel](/docs/sentinel/)** — learn about the engine behind the protection