[reincoder]

I really appreciate. Thank you. We are very transparent about our process. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us.

We have a simplified explanation of our probe network here: https://ipinfo.io/blog/probe-network-how-we-make-sure-our-da...

The only update is the number of servers is like 600+ now. The probe network is growing extremely rapidly.

Our IP geolocation process is quite complicated, and we have a team of data engineers, infrastructure engineers, and data scientists working on various aspects of it. Therefore, our approach is users can ask us questions, and we will try our best to answer them.

[freedomben]

Just wanted to let you know, it's this transparency that turned me into a customer!

I love your company and service, but I hate your pricing. I work with a lot of small clients/apps that paying for usage would be a no-brainer, but the defined monthly price buckets don't make any economical sense at their scale. If you added a "pay as you go" tier that a small app could reasonably start by using dollars worth of API calls per month and grow from there, I'd be spreading your seed all over the place. I'm not saying this to rag on you, just trying to provide some constructive feedback as a thank you for your info sharing!

[reincoder]

Thank you very much; I really appreciate your feedback. This is not the first time I have heard this. The solution is to try to take as much advantage as you can from the free tier.

# Check out the free IP databases

https://ipinfo.io/products/free-ip-database

The free databases come with commercial usage permission, and because they are databases, you can make unlimited lookups from them. The databases provide full accuracy and are updated daily. They are just a subset of our IP geolocation database that only provides IP to Country information.

# Complement the database with the API service

If you only want city-level information, switch to the API service. Use the database to look up IP-to-country information as many times as you want. However, use the API service only when necessary.

Additionally, if you include a credit link to us, we will double your API limit to 100k/month. Visit https://ipinfo.io/contact/creditlink.

# Cache data

All of our API libraries have native caching support. We strongly recommend that users reduce their number of requests by caching the response. I highly recommend you check out our libraries: https://github.com/ipinfo

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The only challenge with the free IP databases is that you need to host the database somewhere to lookup the IP to Country information. Having an API service with nearly unlimited lookups for IP to Country information will be fantastic.

If you know someone who has an IP to Country as API service please, let me know. We only require an attribution for using our database. If you have a similar service that is popular but don't want to maintain it let us know as well, we can takeover the site and host it ourselves with the IP to Country data.

[freedomben]

Thank you, that's super useful info. I didn't realize you had an Erlang library! I'm definitely going to be putting that to use :-)

[incolumitas]

Original Poster here.

If you hate their pricing, then you should join https://ipapi.is/

I have more competitive pricing and all my pricing plans include the full API output.

See for yourself: https://ipapi.is/pricing.html

If you sign up and mail me the code: "HN-IPAPI.IS-2023" I will provide you with the large API plan for 3 months for free.