Spaw vs Ideal Postcodes
Ideal Postcodes is a UK-first address lookup, autocomplete and cleansing API answered from Royal Mail's Postcode Address File, with Ordnance Survey AddressBase Core and Premium offered as additional datasets, sold as pay-as-you-go credit packs, with international address data for more than 240 countries and territories; its site also lists phone and email validation among its products.
The table uses Ideal Postcodes' public pricing and documentation pages as checked on 2026-09-22, and Spaw's own pricing page. A row those pages carry no value for is marked "not on the pages read" rather than guessed at, and that is a statement about the reading and not about what Ideal Postcodes publishes.
| spaw | ideal postcodes | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | 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 | Pay-as-you-go credit packs, "No Subscriptions. No Monthly Fees.": 200 credits for £9 ("£0.045 per lookup"), 1,100 for £42 (£0.038), 4,300 for £155 (£0.036), 12,800 for £420 (£0.033) and 32,100 for £900 (£0.028). "Credits are valid for 12 months"; the lookup guide adds that the timer "only starts when you begin using that batch of credits". Larger volumes and UK registered charities are priced on request. |
| Free tier | 100 free credits every month, no card required | A trial rather than a standing tier: "1-Month Trial", "50 free credits, full support and no credit card needed"; the trial searches worldwide except Ireland, "which requires separate licensing" |
| Price per 1,000 at about 10k | $7.80 (Growth pack: 5,000 credits for $39), or $5.80 on the Growth monthly plan (5,000 credits for $29 a month) | £33 per 1,000 lookups on the 12,800-credit pack (£420, "£0.033 per lookup"), the smallest pack that covers 10,000. |
| Price per 1,000 at about 100k | $4.49 (Volume pack: 100,000 credits for $449), or $3.49 on the Volume monthly plan (100,000 credits for $349 a month) | £28 per 1,000 lookups on the largest published pack (32,100 credits for £900, "£0.028 per lookup"); larger volumes are a custom package. |
| Addresses no register covered billed | An address that stands as written costs 1 credit whether or not a register carried the building; where no register covers the country, exists answers null rather than a verdict | No |
| Addresses that cannot stand billed | No: an address that cannot stand as written is free whatever the reason, and so are repeats within 7 days and rows repeating an address already in the same job | Not when nothing comes back: "Invalid postcodes (ones that return nothing) are free" and a cleanse's "no-match response is free". But "A cleanse that returns a match costs a lookup", and the cleanse returns the closest match, which its documentation says can be a poor one. Autocomplete suggestions cost nothing until a full address is returned. |
| Registers held | Open address registers for 23 countries and territories, each named in the answer with its declared coverage, complete or partial. Complete, building by building: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland. Partial, building by building: Brazil, Denmark, France (with French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Réunion, St. Barthélemy, St. Martin and St. Pierre & Miquelon), Germany and United States. Partial, streets only: Great Britain. House-number ranges as well: United States. Absence from a partial register is never read as evidence that an address does not exist. | Named per country on the coverage table: Royal Mail PAF and OS AddressBase Core for the United Kingdom, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man; the Eircode Address File (ECAF) and Eircode Address Database (ECAD) for Ireland; USPS for the United States, its territories and the freely associated states; Geoscape G-NAF for Australia, Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Norfolk Island; Kadaster for the Netherlands; and Kartverket for Norway and for Svalbard and Jan Mayen. The other countries' rows name no dataset. The pricing page lists Multiple Residence, Not Yet Built, Northern Ireland Pointer, Eircode, AddressBase Core and AddressBase Premium as additional datasets. |
| Country coverage | Postal formats for 207 countries and territories: the line layout for 199 of them, and the required fields and postcode pattern wherever the table records them; 52 postal operators' rules for naming a delivery point that is not a street; open address registers for 23 countries and territories; postcode directories for Great Britain from the ONS Postcode Directory, with Northern Ireland excluded because reusing BT postcodes needs a separate licence, and for 108 more countries and territories from GeoNames' postal codes. | The coverage page counts "243 Countries & territories", "8 Data providers" and "103 With postal codes", grading each country from sub-building down to region level; the pricing page says "240+". |
| Claims post is delivered | No, and every answer says so: is_deliverable, is_cmra, is_vacant and is_residential answer null because that check is licensed and not enabled here. exists is a match in an open address register, never a statement that post arrives. | Not as a deliverability flag. A UK match is a Postcode Address File record returned with its UDPRN and delivery point suffix; the pages read make no separate claim about whether post arrives. |
| Bulk limit | 100,000 addresses per bulk job, with an HMAC-signed completion webhook | ClickCleanse cleans "up to 1,100 UK addresses in your browser"; larger Bulk Cleanse jobs ("Batch-clean thousands of addresses in one go") are arranged on request. |
| Batch API | 100 addresses per synchronous request | not on the pages read |
| Rate limit | 50 requests per second per key on the address endpoints | "Each IP address is rate limited at 30 requests per second"; tripping the limit returns a 503, and the autocomplete API carries an additional limit. |
| Official SDKs | Python, Node.js, PHP | not on the pages read |
| Data retention | No history row and no log line carrying the address. What a lookup leaves is the 7-day marker that makes a repeat free and the count behind seen_by_you, both kept under a digest, never the address. The address itself is kept only on the account's own suppression list and in its monitors. Bulk input lists and result files are deleted with the job after 30 days. | Paid lookups are logged per key with the IP address, search term and URL, downloadable as CSV. Personal data in the log is redacted weekly: the key-logs page says "By default we redact PII older than 28 days" and, further down, that it is redacted "if older than 21 days"; the interval is set from the dashboard, and "Set the interval to 0 days to prevent PII collection altogether". |
checked 2026-09-22 · sources: Ideal Postcodes pricing, Ideal Postcodes: what is a lookup and a credit, Ideal Postcodes global addressing coverage, Ideal Postcodes address cleansing, Ideal Postcodes API reference, Ideal Postcodes cleanse API, Ideal Postcodes key logs
When Ideal Postcodes fits better
UK checkouts and CRMs that want a postcode-to-address picker and address cleansing from Royal Mail's address file, with UPRNs and coordinates included, paid for by the lookup rather than by subscription.
- UPRNs and rooftop geocodes with every UK lookup at no extra cost
- Autocomplete suggestions are free; a credit is spent only when a full address is returned
- A cleanse that finds no match costs nothing: "A no-match response is free."
- One-off credit packs with no subscription, valid for 12 months
- UK address data "refreshed daily against Royal Mail's PAF and Ordnance Survey datasets"
- Discounted pricing for UK registered charities
When Spaw fits better
Developers who want a written address parsed against its own country's rules and checked against open registers, where a field nobody could evaluate answers null instead of a guess.
- Ideal Postcodes can list the addresses at a UK postcode; Spaw cannot, because every full UK list derives from the licensed Postcode Address File: for a postcode in Great Britain its postcode endpoint answers the streets Ordnance Survey's Open Names files under the postcode's district, with no house numbers
- Spaw reads a written address against its own country's format and follows the building into that country's open address register where one is installed; Great Britain has no open building register, so an address in Great Britain is checked against the postcode directory and the streets Ordnance Survey lists, and a listed street never means a building exists
- Ideal Postcodes logs each paid lookup's search term against the key until a redaction interval the account sets; Spaw keeps no history row and no log line carrying the address, only a hashed marker that makes a repeat free
- Spaw's pack credits never expire and one balance buys every signal it sells; an address that cannot stand as written costs nothing
Questions
Does Spaw charge for addresses no register covers?
An address that stands as written costs 1 credit, whether or not a register carried the building. An address that cannot stand costs nothing, whatever the reason, and a repeat within seven days is free. Where no register covers the country, or where the register that answered is one whose coverage is partial and does not carry the address, exists answers null — not evaluated — rather than a verdict, and the not_in_register weight cannot fire. Ideal Postcodes states that it does not bill unknown results.
Can I move an address list from Ideal Postcodes to Spaw?
Yes. Upload the CSV in the dashboard or POST it to the bulk endpoint, up to 100,000 addresses a job; Spaw keeps your columns and adds 64 result columns after them (the address as submitted, the answer, the datasets behind it, what the row cost and whether your suppression list answered it), and a country column gives each row its own country. Rows repeating an address already in the list are answered once, cost nothing, and are counted as duplicates.
Is there a free tier?
Every Spaw account receives 100 free credits at the start of each month with no card on file, and unused free credits accumulate. Ideal Postcodes offers: A trial rather than a standing tier: "1-Month Trial", "50 free credits, full support and no credit card needed"; the trial searches worldwide except Ireland, "which requires separate licensing".
Try Spaw on your own list
Free credits every month, no card. Upload a list, keep your columns, and download only the rows you want. See the pricing page for every rule, or the Ideal Postcodes alternatives.
Ideal Postcodes is a trademark of its owner. Spaw is not affiliated with it. Markdown version: /compare/ideal-postcodes.md