Why are you paying for the IP to Country and ASN service?
MaxMind’s GeoIP Country API service
Pricing
MaxMind charges $0.0001 per API request, with a minimum spend of $20. You can buy $25k worth of API request queries and get a quarter of a billion requests if you want.
API response
{
"continent": {
"code": "NA",
"geoname_id": 123456,
"names": {
"de": "Nordamerika",
"en": "North America",
"es": "América del Norte",
"fr": "Amérique du Nord",
"ja": "北アメリカ",
"pt-BR": "América do Norte",
"ru": "Северная Америка",
"zh-CN": "北美洲"
}
},
"country": {
"geoname_id": 6252001,
"is_in_european_union": false,
"iso_code": "US",
"names": {
"de": "USA",
"en": "United States",
"es": "Estados Unidos",
"fr": "États-Unis",
"ja": "アメリカ合衆国",
"pt-BR": "Estados Unidos",
"ru": "США",
"zh-CN": "美国"
}
},
"maxmind": {
"queries_remaining": 54321
},
"registered_country": {
"geoname_id": 6252001,
"is_in_european_union": true,
"iso_code": "US",
"names": {
"de": "USA",
"en": "United States",
"es": "Estados Unidos",
"fr": "États-Unis",
"ja": "アメリカ合衆国",
"pt-BR": "Estados Unidos",
"ru": "США",
"zh-CN": "美国"
}
},
"represented_country": {
"geoname_id": 6252001,
"is_in_european_union": true,
"iso_code": "US",
"names": {
"de": "USA",
"en": "United States",
"es": "Estados Unidos",
"fr": "États-Unis",
"ja": "アメリカ合衆国",
"pt-BR": "Estados Unidos",
"ru": "США",
"zh-CN": "美国"
},
"type": "military"
},
"traits": {
"ip_address": "1.2.3.4",
"is_anycast": true,
"network": "1.2.3.0/24"
}
}
Let’s summarize the response fields:
- Country
- Continent
- Registered Country
- European Union check
- Geoname
- IP Type
- Traits
- Translation in 7 languages
- Queries remaining
- Anycast
License
I am not going to read through this document. So, do your own research. They have a tendency to enforce licensing agreements and have EULA and redistribution clauses, so if you are open source project, I would highly reccommend investing the time to understand their license and usage policy.
IPinfo Lite API service
IPinfo Lite: The Most Accurate Free IP Geolocation API & Database - IPinfo.io
Pricing
It is free. That is it. Free and unlimited. Do whatever you want with it.
But here is a fair comparison:
| Queries | MaxMind | IPinfo |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $20 | Free |
| 200,000 | $20 | Free |
| 250,000 | $25 | Free |
| 2,500,000 | $250 | Free |
| 250,000,000 | $25,000 | Free |
There are no minimum or maximum usage limits. We have established a dedicated infrastructure to support mission-critical operations on enterprise-grade systems that can support governments, multinational companies, critical software services such as operating systems, foundational open source projects, and more.
The API is designed to support nationwide cybersecurity efforts, but it will still be offered as a free service.
Response
Documentation for IPinfo Lite API - IPinfo.io
{
"ip": "1.2.3.4",
"country_code": "AU",
"country": "Australia",
"continent_code": "OC",
"continent": "Oceania"
}
- Country
- Continent
- ASN Information
Our API response is not as extensive as theirs, but we should take a closer look.
Geoname ID: The foundation behind MaxMind’s location data
Geonames.org is a crowdsourced location service that is considered a cornerstone for location data. A bulk of MaxMind location information such as geoname_id, name, code, and even the translation could reasonably be assumed to be sourced directly from Geonames.
However, Geonames.org makes this data available for every user themselves. We use this data ourselves too. Instead of repackaging the data from Geonames and pushing it to an API, we want users to directly source the additional information from Geonames and support the non-profit program.
We are also a proud sponsor
of geonames.org to show gratitude for the good they bring to the internet and the data community at large.
Removing geonames.org data, we have the following API data:
Low-impact or unnecessary fields
- EU Check: There are only 27 countries in the EU. Users can easily build a static reference object to check whether a country is an EU member. For us, aiming to support billions of concurrent requests at scale, even this small amount of request size adds up, and we do not think it adds significant value to the users. We believe in delivering what is necessary, similar to the situation with Geonames data above.
- Queries Remaining: We are providing unlimited queries; this information is unnecessary for us to provide because the number of queries will always remain infinite.
Removing low-impact or unnecessary fields, we have the following API data:
Registered Country
Registered country as MaxMind puts it:
In some cases, an IP address may be located in one country, but the network it is associated with may be registered to a different country. This may be the case for mobile carrier companies who provide service in several countries, or other institutions that register and manage networks that may cross national borders.
We do provide ASN country data
, but it is available on our IPinfo Core API service
. However, we do not think that for normal day-to-day use cases, using ASN-registered country information is a necessary field. If you need, you can sign up for our IPinfo Core API service
.
Represented Country
there are some networks that represent a different country from the one in which they’re located. For example, a network used by an overseas military base or embassy will be located in a different country than the one that the network represents. For represented countries, our data includes the “type” of representation. Currently, the only type in our data is “military.”
I have no idea what that means. 
The type being only “military” is confusing to me. If you are using any ISP or hosting IP addresses and you have a type called “military,” this is confusing. Moreover, with the rapid adoption of conversation, these type field confusions LLM AI and mark all IP addresses as military type as they do not have the context that is found deep down MaxMind’s documentation.
This seems like a very niche case or borderline unnecessary field for geolocation data. We do not like to add unnecessary or low-impact data to our API response to make it generally useful.
Anycast
Anycast data is available to our users through the IPinfo Core API. Please understand that our anycast data is superior to any comparable data point out there, as we actually run network measurements through the ProbeNet Platform, which consists of more than a thousand servers around the world.
Most other IP geolocation services, presumably like MaxMind, rely heavily on the information available to them in public internet records like WHOIS to identify Anycast network IP addresses. However, our data is backed by active measurements, and through network behavior, we can reliably provide this information to users.
Network
Network field is available in the IPinfo Core database
, which provides detailed ASN data. We rely on BGP data for accurate representation of IP range ownership and activity status of IP ranges.
ASN
MaxMind does not provide ASN information; however, we provide three ASN information:
- AS Organization name
- ASN
- ASN organization domain
The ASN organization domain is particularly interesting as a lot of effort is invested to make it super accurate. We try to match the actual organization domain name with the available data we have. This helps to identify organizations that operate with a different ASN name in different countries or different ASN.
Moreover, you can use the ASN domain information as a UID (Unique Identifier) to identify individual ASNs and tag them as hosting, cISP, and other types yourself.
You can also use the ASN domain to identify organization types based on TLD such as:
.edu→ Education.mil→ Military.gov→ Government
Overall conclusion
The data that we do not have on our Lite data service are available in our IPinfo Core data service. The lack of this data does not mean that we are withholding access, but rather that the amount of engineering and research that went into producing it exceeds the investment made by the rest of the industry.
We have invested in engineering, network measurements, and research programs to develop this data, which is why we have chosen to share access through our IPinfo Core service.
License
The data is shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0
- Permits commercial usage
- Permits sharing access token
- Requires an attribution statement
Pretty simple and straightforward.
Moving towards what makes our ultimately better: The Data
The data you have access to, whether it be by country or ASN, is simply superior - there is no other way to put it.
Our data comes from our ProbeNet platform, which is a distributed platform with over a thousand ProbeNet PoPs all over the world. You are tapping into that data. This is one of the most sophisticated, challenging, and significant ways to generate highly reliable and accurate data, and we are delivering that to you.
There are no inherent compromises or gotchas; you get the best. The country or ASN data you have is the same data available to all government agencies, network infrastructure companies, cybersecurity efforts, analytics programs across all major software, analytics, cybersecurity, and tech companies all over the world.