IP Geo API

IP Geo API vs ipapi.co in 2026: Free-Tier Attribution, EU Residency, and the Threat-Detection Question

5-minute read · 2026 pricing · honest assessment

If ipapi.co is on your IP-geolocation shortlist in 2026, the comparison usually comes down to three things: does the free tier carry an attribution backlink, do you need EU data residency, and are VPN / proxy / Tor flags first-class on the free plan or paywalled? ipapi.co has a clean REST shape, multiple response formats, and broad community SDKs, but its 2018-era pricing posture (free-tier requires “Powered by ipapi” attribution, USD billing, basic threat-detection only on paid tiers) creates real friction for a lot of modern teams. This post lays out where each one wins, without the marketing varnish.

Looking for the full feature matrix? Jump straight to the ipapi.co alternative comparison →.

The 60-second take

What you care about Choose
JSONP / XML / CSV response format (legacy parsers) ipapi.co
Global Anycast edge for non-EU users ipapi.co
Multiple long-lived community SDKs ipapi.co
Attribution-free free tier (no “Powered by”) IP Geo API
VPN / Proxy / Tor / Datacenter flags bundled free IP Geo API
EU-only data residency (no US transit) IP Geo API
EUR billing + iDEAL / SEPA / Bancontact IP Geo API
100K req/mo paid entry at €29 (vs $35 for 50K) IP Geo API

Pick the row that’s the dealbreaker. If two rows pull opposite directions, the row enforcing a hard architectural or compliance constraint wins — for example, “we cannot ship a paid product with a ‘Powered by ipapi’ badge” beats “we’d prefer XML responses.”

The real reasons teams switch from ipapi.co to IP Geo API

The most common switch story we hear isn’t about price or latency. It’s about production realities that the 2018-era ipapi.co free-tier posture didn’t anticipate:

  1. Attribution backlink on the free tier blocks paid products. ipapi.co’s free 1.000 req/day requires a “Powered by ipapi” link on the consuming page. For any commercial product — paid SaaS, white-label dashboard, B2B portal — that’s not acceptable, and the upgrade path starts at $35/mo for 50K req/mo. Our free tier is 1.000 req/day without attribution, so MVPs and paid side projects ship without an upfront invoice or a vendor-branded backlink.
  2. Threat detection is paid-only. ipapi.co’s proxy / tor flags are restricted to paid tiers, and even there the surface is thin (no VPN classification, no datacenter flag). We bundle is_vpn, is_proxy, is_tor, is_datacenter, and is_residential into every response on every tier, including free.
  3. EU-only data residency for regulated sectors. ipapi.co’s privacy page does not commit to EU-only data flow; queries can transit US-based edge nodes. For fintech, healthtech, gov-tech, and adtech under GDPR scrutiny, that’s a documented Article 44/45 transfer-assessment problem. We’re EU-only at infra (Hetzner Frankfurt + Vercel fra1), at contract, and at corporate level.
  4. USD billing fatigue. Stripe/USD invoicing plus monthly FX adds 1-3% friction on every European invoice. Dutch, Belgian, German, and French finance teams flag this on every close. We bill EUR via Mollie with iDEAL, SEPA, Bancontact, and credit card as first-class methods.
  5. 50K req/mo is an awkward step-up. ipapi.co’s first paid tier ($35/mo, 50K req/mo) is roughly half the volume of our entry plan (€29/mo, 100K req/mo) at a higher absolute price after FX. Teams that grow past the free tier hit “pay more, get less” friction within the first paid month.

If none of these hit your stack, ipapi.co’s clean shape, response-format breadth, and community SDK coverage are genuinely good and you have no switching reason. Stay where you are.

The real reasons to not switch

We try to be straight about this — the fastest way to lose a customer is to oversell the migration.

What migration actually looks like

For most teams the move is a single base-URL flip plus a thin response-shape adapter:

- // ipapi.co (path-based, attribution required on free tier)
- const r = await fetch(`https://ipapi.co/${ip}/json/`);
- const data = await r.json();
- const country = data.country_code;
- const city = data.city;
+ // IP Geo API (auth-header, attribution-free)
+ const r = await fetch(`https://ipgeo.10b.app/v1/lookup/${ip}`, {
+   headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.IPGEO_API_KEY}` }
+ });
+ const data = await r.json();
+ const country = data.country_code;
+ const city = data.city;

The non-obvious work is field mapping. ipapi.co uses country_code, region, city, latitude, longitude, timezone, plus optional proxy / tor flags on paid plans. We use a flatter contract: country_code, region, city, lat, lon, timezone, with is_vpn / is_proxy / is_tor / is_datacenter / is_residential always present at the top level. Full mapping table on the ipapi.co alternative comparison page.

What we recommend:

  1. Dual-call for 24-48h. In the request handler, call both ipapi.co and our API; log every diff to a structured store. The most common diffs are city-naming (we use canonical English; ipapi.co occasionally returns local-script names) and ASN organization formatting.
  2. Cache the response. Most workloads see a 60-80% IP repeat-rate within an hour. A 1-hour TTL cache (Redis, Memcached, or local LRU) cuts your billable count proportionally — and brings effective latency back below 1ms for hot IPs even on a REST API.
  3. Keep the ipapi.co free tier warm for 7 days as rollback insurance, then remove the attribution backlink and any community SDK references.

Full migration guide with curl examples is on the ipapi.co alternative comparison page.

Pricing math at three common volumes

Direct apples-to-apples is straightforward because both vendors meter per-request. The table below is illustrative based on 2026 public list pricing for the most common workload (city-level + threat detection):

Monthly volume ipapi.co IP Geo API Notes
50K req/mo $35 (Developer) — basic threat flags only €29 (Starter, 100K) IP Geo API includes 2× volume + full threat block at parity feature set
500K req/mo ~$100 (Business) €99 (Business) Roughly comparable; bundled VPN/datacenter classification is the differentiator
5M req/mo Custom (typically $300+/mo) €399 (Scale) Comparable; EUR billing avoids FX
Compliance overhead (EU residency docs, DPA, transfer assessments) ipapi.co SCC + your DPO time EU-only, no transfer assessment Often dominates the unit economics for regulated sectors

Numbers above are list-price snapshots from ipapi.co’s public pricing page on 2026-04-23. Negotiated annual contracts vary. The headline: ipapi.co’s flat plans are competitive once you factor out the attribution requirement and the basic threat-detection surface — but for workloads that need VPN/proxy/datacenter flags from day one or cannot ship a “Powered by” backlink, IP Geo API’s per-request total cost of ownership tends to be lower across the 50K-1M req/mo zone where most indie / SMB / scaleup teams sit.

Trust check: should you trust this comparison?

Honest disclosure: this post is on the IP Geo API blog. We have a commercial reason to suggest switching. We tried to compensate for that bias by:

If you spot a factual error, email hello@ipgeo.10b.app — we’ll edit and add a correction note above the fold within 48h. We’d rather be cited as accurate than aggressive.

Try IP Geo API in 5 minutes

# 1. Sign up — no credit card, 1.000 lookups/day on free tier, no attribution backlink
open https://ipgeo.10b.app/pricing

# 2. Test against a known IP (Google DNS) — note the bundled threat block
curl https://ipgeo.10b.app/v1/lookup/8.8.8.8 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $IPGEO_API_KEY"

# 3. Inspect the threat fields — no paid-tier upgrade required
curl https://ipgeo.10b.app/v1/lookup/8.8.8.8 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $IPGEO_API_KEY" | jq '{is_vpn,is_proxy,is_tor,is_datacenter,is_residential}'

Sign up free → · Full ipapi.co comparison → · API reference →

FAQ

Why is ipapi.co’s free-tier attribution such a big deal? The “Powered by ipapi” backlink is fine for an open-source side project, a personal blog, or an unmonetised demo. It is not fine for a paid SaaS, a B2B portal, or a white-label customer dashboard — those products either upgrade to a paid plan or look unprofessional. Our free 1.000/day tier ships attribution-free so commercial pre-revenue products can validate before paying.

Is the threat data better than ipapi.co’s paid proxy / tor fields? Different upstream composition. Our is_vpn/is_proxy/is_tor/is_datacenter/is_residential classifiers run on an ensemble of public abuse feeds (Spamhaus DROP, FireHOL, AbuseIPDB-lite) plus our own passive-probe data. ipapi.co’s threat-flag composition is not publicly documented and the surface is narrower (proxy + tor only, no VPN or datacenter classification). Both cover the common 80% of fraud-relevant flags well; specialized fraud platforms typically run their own ML on top regardless of vendor.

Will my ipapi.co-shaped code work as-is with IP Geo API? Mostly the field names overlap (country_code, region, city, latitude/longitude ≈ lat/lon). Edge cases (languages, currency, country_calling_code, utc_offset vs timezone) need a thin adapter — see the field mapping table.

Can I use IP Geo API with JSONP for client-side scripts on a non-CORS site? Not today. We require auth-header on every request, which means JSONP <script src="..."> tags don’t work. For client-side JavaScript, use a server-side proxy on the same origin or call our API from a backend route. ipapi.co’s JSONP-friendly URL-key pattern is a fit for legacy CORS-blocked frontends.

What happens if your API has an outage? Public status page: https://status.ipgeo.10b.app with a 90-day rolling history. Our SLA is 99.5% on Business plan (multi-region active-active across Frankfurt + Amsterdam). Most production deployments cache responses with a TTL of 1-24h, which means a brief API outage degrades to stale data, not failed lookups.

Related reading

Drop-in migration guides for adjacent providers (in case you’re consolidating multiple sources onto IP Geo API):

If you’re evaluating IP geolocation APIs against multiple providers, the other head-on comparisons in this series may help:

Industry deep-dives

Last reviewed 2026-05-09 · IP Geo API team · Comments / corrections: hello@ipgeo.10b.app

Pairs with the full ipapi.co alternative comparison page — has the complete feature matrix, migration guide, and pricing snapshot.

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