ip-api alternatives
ip-api is a geolocation JSON API with a free, non-commercial, HTTP-only endpoint limited by request rate, and a Pro subscription that adds HTTPS, unlimited queries and commercial use; its answer carries one proxy flag, one hosting flag and one mobile flag beside the location and network fields. The services below are the other options in the same category, each with the figures its own public pages state as of 2026-09-12. Spaw is listed first because this is Spaw's site; the side-by-side comparison has the full table.
| service | pricing model | free tier | price per 1,000 at ~10k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spaw | Pay-as-you-go credit packs whose credits never expire, or optional plans, billed monthly or yearly, that deposit the same credits every month for less and roll unused plan credits over up to three months' allowance; both through Stripe Checkout. One credit buys five answered IP lookups | 100 free credits every month, no card required | $1.80 per 1,000 IP lookups at 5 to the credit (Starter pack: 1,000 credits for $9), or $1.40 on the Starter monthly plan (1,000 credits for $7 a month) |
| AbuseIPDB | Plans with daily request allowances: Individual free "Forever!", Basic $25/mo or $228/year, Premium $99/mo or $1,068/year, Enterprise custom | Individual: free forever with no credit card, 1,000 check and report requests, 100 block checks and 5 bulk reports a day | not on the pages read |
| IP2Location | IP2Location.io API, monthly query plans: Free $0 ("50K IP Geolocation API queries/month", "11 IP Attributes", "Attribution Required"), Starter "$49/month" ("150K IP Geolocation API queries/month", "20 IP Attributes"), Plus "$249/month" ("300K IP Geolocation API queries/month", "59 IP Attributes"), Security "$499/month" ("600K IP Geolocation API queries/month", "79 IP Attributes"); overage per increment Starter $10, Plus $50, Security $100. Databases, standard licence per year: DB1 "$99", DB2 "$399", DB8 "$1,299", DB18 "$2,799", with a site licence at ten times those figures. | "50K IP Geolocation API queries/month" with 11 attributes, basic geolocation and open-proxy detection only, "Attribution Required"; without a key "up to 1,000 queries per day" | not on the pages read |
| ipapi | Monthly plans by lookup quota: Starter "$15 billed monthly" for 60,000 lookups, Professional "$25 billed monthly" for 150,000, Business "$49 billed monthly" for 500,000, Enterprise "$99 billed monthly" for 2,000,000, Premium "$199 billed monthly" for 6,000,000, Ultimate "$399 billed monthly" for 15,000,000; annual billing is 20% less. | A free trial of "up-to 1000 IP lookups in a day" (about 30,000 a month), "for testing & development purposes" and "Not for production use" | not on the pages read |
| ipdata | Monthly plans by daily request quota: Personal "$10 per month" with "2,500 requests daily", Lite "$30 per month" with "10,000 requests daily", Startup "$50 per month" with "50,000 requests daily", Business "$120 per month" with "100,000 requests daily"; "20% off all annual plans" at the time of reading. | "1500 free requests daily", "restricted to non-commercial use"; on the free tier, over the quota "all further requests are blocked and you receive an email notification" | not on the pages read |
| ipgeolocation.io | Monthly credit plans, "A standard unified IP lookup uses 1 credit": Starter "$19/month" for "150000 API Credits Per month", Plus "$49/month" for 500,000, Pro "$79/month" for 1,000,000, Business "$129/month" for 2,000,000, Premium "$249/month" for 5,000,000, Enterprise "Contact Sales"; annual billing gives "2 months free". "Paid monthly plans reset every month. Paid annual plans reset every year". | "1000 API Credits Per day for life" with no credit card, "a hard limit of 1000 requests per day" and "No overages on Free"; the free plan returns "core location without the radius and confidence fields" | not on the pages read |
| IPinfo | Monthly plans by API request quota: Lite $0/mo, Core $26/mo for 150,000 requests, Max $163/mo for 250,000, Enterprise custom for "1M+". Database downloads are listed separately, "Starting at $1,000/month". | IPinfo Lite at "$0/mo", free forever with no credit card, giving unlimited API requests at country level only | not on the pages read |
| IPQualityScore | Monthly plans by lookup quota: Free $0 (1,000 lookups a month), Startup "As low as: $99 / Month" (5,000), SMB Basic "$499" (10,000), SMB+ "$999" (75,000), Enterprise custom. "Any valid request sent to our Proxy Detection, Email Verification, or Device Fingerprinting services including lookups performed through a batch CSV file check will consume a lookup credit." | 1,000 lookups a month, capped at 35 a day | not on the pages read |
| Ipregistry | Credits, "1 lookup = 1 request = 1 credit" (batch endpoints use "one credit per lookup in the batch request, plus 1"). Subscriptions: Starter "100,000 credits / mo" at "$29 $24 / month", Professional "300,000 credits / mo" at "$79 $66 / month", Business "1,150,000 credits / mo" at "$199 $166 / month", Scale "2,450,000 credits / mo" at "$399 $333 / month" (the lower figure is the annual rate). Pay-as-you-go packs: 15,000 credits for $10, 100,000 for $50, 250,000 for $100, 1,750,000 for $500. | "20,000 free credits on sign-up" with "No credit card, no time limit" | $0.67 (the $10 pack of 15,000 credits, $0.000667 a lookup) |
| ipstack | Monthly plans by request quota: Free "100 Request/mo." at $0, Basic "50,000 Request/mo." at "$12.99/mo.", Professional "500,000 Request/mo." at "$59.99/mo.", Professional + "2,000,000 Request/mo." at "$99.99/mo.", Custom on request; yearly billing "Save up to 15%". Overage fees apply past the quota, with notifications at 75%, 90% and 100%. | "100 Request/mo." at $0, without SSL encryption, support or the paid modules (SSL, commercial use and the Location, Time Zone and Connection modules are listed for paid plans) | not on the pages read |
| MaxMind | Per query, by service, with no minimum published: "If you estimate your volume of queries to be over $2,500 a month, contact us to discuss rates." | A no-cost trial is offered ("Experience the functionality and benefits of our GeoIP web services at no cost"); no free monthly allowance is stated on the page checked | $0.10 per 1,000 for Country ($0.0001 a query), $0.30 for City Plus ($0.0003) and $2.00 for Insights ($0.002) |
| proxycheck.io | not on the pages read | not on the pages read | not on the pages read |
| Spur | not on the pages read | not on the pages read | not on the pages read |
Spaw
Verification API that bills per answered lookup across six signals on one key and one balance: Email verification, Phone intelligence, IP intelligence, Address verification, Business verification against open registers, and Cross-signal consistency, which runs any subset of the first four in one call and names where they agree and where they do not. The IP side answers from local databases and compiled public feeds: where an address is, who runs it, and whether it is a visitor at all.
Developers who want every public IP feed compiled, dated and named for them, with a risk score whose weights are published so it can be recomputed or ignored.
AbuseIPDB
AbuseIPDB is a reputation service built on abuse reports its own users submit: a check returns an abuse confidence score with the report count, country, usage type, ISP and a Tor flag, and plans are sold as daily request allowances rather than credits.
Teams that want to know whether other operators have complained about an address recently, and to contribute their own reports back.
IP2Location
IP2Location sells geolocation as downloadable databases (DB1 to DB26, licensed yearly) and, through IP2Location.io, as an API on monthly query plans whose higher tiers add proxy, VPN, Tor, datacenter, crawler and residential-proxy detection and a fraud score; the classic web service no longer takes new registrations.
Teams that want a downloadable database under a yearly licence, or an API whose top plan carries a fraud score and a wide set of proxy and crawler flags.
ipapi
ipapi.co is a geolocation API sold as monthly lookup quotas, whose pricing page credits its data to DB-IP and the IP2Location LITE database; the answer carries location, country and network fields and no proxy, VPN or Tor flag.
Teams that need country, city, currency and network facts on a predictable monthly quota and do not need any anonymity or threat signal.
ipdata
ipdata is a geolocation and threat API sold as daily request quotas, from a free non-commercial tier to a Business plan, whose pricing page says it does not keep records of the addresses looked up beyond a day; its documentation site refused automated reading, so the fields are not reproduced here.
Teams that want a daily quota with a no-records promise and are happy to read the field list from the vendor's own documentation.
ipgeolocation.io
ipgeolocation.io sells geolocation and a separate security API on monthly credit plans, with location built from its own measurements and a security answer that flags VPN, proxy, residential proxy and Tor with provider names, confidence scores and a 0 to 100 threat score.
Teams that want an accuracy radius with every city answer and a single threat score from a vendor that runs its own honeypots.
IPinfo
IPinfo is an IP data company that sells geolocation, ASN, privacy detection and company data as monthly API plans and as database downloads, collected through its own measurement network rather than assembled from third-party feeds.
Teams that want city-level geolocation from a vendor that measures the internet itself, and are willing to buy a plan tier per field they need.
IPQualityScore
IPQualityScore sells fraud detection across several signals on one lookup credit: proxy and VPN detection, email verification and device fingerprinting all draw from the same monthly quota, and the IP answer carries a fraud score alongside the connection facts.
Teams that want one vendor, one credit pool and a single fraud score across IP, email and device signals.
Ipregistry
Ipregistry is a geolocation and threat API sold as credits, either monthly subscriptions or pay-as-you-go packs, whose security object answers abuser, attacker, bogon, cloud provider, proxy, relay, Tor, VPN, anonymous and threat flags and whose data is described as built from BGP tables, registry databases, geofeeds and latency measurements.
Teams that want a credit model with pay-as-you-go packs and a security object with a dozen named flags, from a vendor that names its data sources in general terms.
ipstack
ipstack is a geolocation API on monthly request quotas from a 100-request free tier to a two-million-request plan, with a bulk endpoint and a security module reserved for its top plan; its documentation pages rendered only a header to our fetcher, so the field list is not reproduced here.
Teams already on the apilayer marketplace that want a high-volume monthly quota and are willing to buy the top plan for bulk and security answers.
MaxMind
MaxMind sells GeoIP as three per-query web services — Country, City Plus and Insights — and as downloadable databases, with proxy and anonymiser detection reserved for the Insights tier.
Teams that want geolocation at the lowest published per-query price and are content to buy Insights, at twenty times the City Plus rate, for anonymiser detection.
proxycheck.io
proxycheck.io sells an API for checking whether an address is a proxy; every page we tried on 2026-09-12 answered 403 Forbidden to automated reading, so nothing about its pricing, limits, fields or data is reproduced here.
Not assessable from the vendor's pages on the checked date.
Spur
Spur is an anonymity-infrastructure vendor: its Context API answers whether an address is a VPN, proxy or other tunnel with the operator named, and its feeds list anonymous, residential-proxy and datacenter address space; its pricing page rate-limited our fetcher, so prices are not reproduced here.
Security teams that want anonymity infrastructure, residential proxies included, as a feed to run inside their own systems, with the operator behind each tunnel named.
Start with the free grant
Every Spaw account gets free credits every month with no card. Verify a sample from your list and compare the verdicts before you commit to anything.
ip-api and the other product names are trademarks of their owners. Spaw is not affiliated with them. Markdown version: /alternatives/ip-api.md