Show HN: IPLocate.io – a free IP geolocation service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: IPLocate.io – a free IP geolocation service

iplocate.io

20 pointstallytarik16 comments

Hi HN! I've developed IPLocate.io, a super simple IP geolocation service to return data like country, city, timezone, etc. for IP addresses.

It's free up to 1,500 requests per day, beyond which we have a couple of paid plans to accommodate higher limits.

We've got some code samples for various languages on the home page as well as documentation by Apiary.

It's a super simple Rails app powered by MaxMind data.

I've been developing in the web and mobile space for years, but this is my first web project I'm finally releasing to the public - I'm not expecting it to be a money maker but just wanted to get a feel for reaction from the hacker community!

Congrats on the launch! Looks very similar to my service, https://ipinfo.io :) I launched that around 3 years ago and at the time there weren't even any paid plans. It now handles close to 500 million API requests a day.

I'd recommend killing the unlimited plan - you'll lose out on revenue with that.

Good luck! Feel free to reach out to me if there's anything you think I could help with.

Thank you! And congratulations on 500m requests per day - that's insane!

Thanks for the tip on pricing, the plans are essentially guesswork at the moment until I see some real users with real usage. I checked out some other services (including yours ;) ) and saw a wide range of pricing, some that had unlimited plans and some that didn't. Will definitely be something to revisit in the future.

I think coderholic gave you a good advice. If you're on amazon with a pay per use plan, you should immediately do the math of what it's going to cost you if someone does 1M request a day.

Let's say someone who make an equivalent service, sells cheaper plans, and uses yours for example.

How many people pay for your service? Anything above $100 a month, and I can buy the database from MaxMind.

Hmmm...

The output is practically the same as https://freegeoip.net/json/

But their free limit is a whooping 240x yours (and it's been very reliable for a client of mine). Are you piggybacking/bootstrapping off this?

Why iplocate.io rather than the reliable freegeoip.net

How is this different from

https://db-ip.com/api

https://ipapi.co

https://freegeoip.net

http://ipinfodb.com

https://www.iplocation.net

http://neutrinoapi.com

http://www.ip2location.com

https://www.telize.com

and a few dozen more....?[1]

[1] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681118

What is the redundancy on this service? CloudFlare in front. How about the backends? Are you cross zone? Cross region?

Also, nitpick, but using `X-` headers are deprecated, even though everybody still does it. Recommend changing auth header to `IPLocate-API-Key`.

It's currently hosted on AWS, multi-instance in a single AZ. It has the ability to scale across zones easily, but my priority was to make sure I'm not hit with unreasonable costs for my small side project while it has 1 user. :)

Thanks for the tip about the header - I didn't know that! I can certainly change the name.

Good luck. I'm running a Go app (https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip) on a single f1-micro in Google Cloud for my startup. It works, no problems, no fuss, but certainly can see lots of people paying for GeoIP. Maybe focus on creating a Heroku plugin?

how is this different from ipinfo.info?

curl ipinfo.io gives me the same info.

Have you talked to MaxMind about becoming an authorized data reseller? The downloadable data file (which I assume you are using), does not allow selling lookups as a service.

https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-faq/geoip2-and-geoip-legac...

The database being used is under a licence that allows commercial use :)

I wonder how these services will work with ipv6, my address from hurricane electric just returns "North America"

I would pay for an API that will let me lookup company name based on IP address, anyone providing this type of service?

We have a company details API that does exactly that at ipinfo.io - get in touch at support@ipinfo.io if you'd like more details or see https://ipinfo.io/products

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