1. We are different because most of all other services segment the data based on tiers. We return the entire dataset even for free users.
2. Our Free tier is huge compared to other services.
3. We are fast. Our response time is in the region of 50ms, which is really good for the amount to information we return. We don't cache our response, we always return fresh data.
About MaxMind, you are right about how easy would be to have an in-house solution. But a highly scalable, distributed infrastructure like ours guarantees the same response time from multiple locations across the world. Also, having the solution in-house would need updating and maintainig the database periodically as well.
The free maxminddb geolite2 does fine for most cases, too. Nice and easy-to-use python module to go with it. I'm pretty sure the city one is ~100MB, so doable to keep a copy on-device.
I think it is all down to the usage and performance needed. If you need high resiliency and performances, using a third party API like smartip.io is the way to go.
If the requirements are less strict then using a local db like MaxMind would be the right choice.
As a side note, we offer very simple and well documented libraries in C#, Typescript and PHP.
1. We are different because most of all other services segment the data based on tiers. We return the entire dataset even for free users.
2. Our Free tier is huge compared to other services.
3. We are fast. Our response time is in the region of 50ms, which is really good for the amount to information we return. We don't cache our response, we always return fresh data.
About MaxMind, you are right about how easy would be to have an in-house solution. But a highly scalable, distributed infrastructure like ours guarantees the same response time from multiple locations across the world. Also, having the solution in-house would need updating and maintainig the database periodically as well.