I'm trying to tackle overpriced and restrictive IP geolocation services

I also posted the majority of this on /r/sideproject on reddit. FYI. Hoping its ok because it didn't make a ton of sense to re-write essentially the same thing with the same info. Also I don't feel like this is good as a Show HN because the thing I did is a subscription service.

Always feels weird to share links to stuff you build.

I started an api service back in 2010/2011. I was working on something and needed to get a website visitor's IP address in the web app. But because javascript in the browser is sandboxed (i.e. no IP for you), I ran into a problem I needed a solution for.

This led me over that weekend to build https://jsonip.com. It lets you fire off a CORS or use JSONP to get the results of the api call and use IP address in your app. It might not have been the first, but it was definitely one of the earlier similar services that are around these days.

Fast forward a little over 12 years or so and the api is still going strong. The service has been free the whole time and without any limits on the number of requests you can make. I'm supporting 60-70 million requests a day. In the last 30 days, its almost up to 1.4 billion requests. Really crazy to see that.

Another related feature I've looked at is geolocation. That's where you can take an IP address and get geographical info about it. They aren't super accurate at the most specific level (you aren't going to get a street address for an IP), but they do a great job showing approximately where an IP is down to the city level and sometimes even zip code. Its really useful in a lot of cases.

But one thing has bothered me about this. There's at least a handful of companies already operating in this space. Go google "ip geolocation api". Take a look through them and you'll see a common pattern.

* They're bloody expensive. * They invoke artificially low limits on the number of requests you can make per month.

It doesn't make any damn sense.

I've been thinking about trying to tackle this problem for a couple years and I'm finally launching a service that I hope can attack the problem.

(Here comes the uncomfortable linking to things. Groan...)

Ok so here it is. https://getjsonip.com/#plus. Its a subscription service (big shock, right?) that lets you do as many geoip lookups as you want.

I hope this can be helpful to at least some small number of people. At a minimum, at least a few subscribers would help offset the cost of running jsonip.com for all these years.

Would love to get feedback if anyone has some to offer.