# Spaw vs IPinfo: IP intelligence API comparison

How Spaw and IPinfo compare on pricing, billing rules, the feeds behind each flag and limits, from IPinfo's public pages checked on 2026-09-10. Corrections: support@spaw.co.

| | Spaw | IPinfo |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go credit packs, or optional monthly plans that deposit the same credits every month for less; both through Stripe Checkout, credits from either never expire | 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". |
| Free tier | 10 free credits every month, no card required | IPinfo Lite at "$0/mo", free forever with no credit card, giving unlimited API requests at country level only |
| 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) | not on the pages read |
| Price per 1,000 at about 100k | $4.99 (Volume pack: 100,000 credits for $499), or $3.99 on the Volume monthly plan (100,000 credits for $399 a month) | not on the pages read |
| Addresses no feed covered billed | An answered address costs 1 credit whatever its flags say; a flag no feed could evaluate answers null rather than false, and the answer costs the same | not on the pages read |
| Reserved and private ranges billed | No: reserved, private, loopback, CGNAT, documentation and multicast ranges answer reason reserved_range and are free, and so are repeats within 7 days | not on the pages read |
| Feeds behind the flags | Public feeds, each named in the answer with the date it was synced: DB-IP Lite and RFC 8805 geofeeds for location, the five registries' delegated statistics for allocation, Spamhaus DROP and ASN-DROP and abuse.ch Feodo Tracker for blocklists, the Tor Project's exit list and Onionoo, the Mullvad, NordVPN and Private Internet Access server lists plus the open X4BNet lists, Apple's iCloud Private Relay egress list, the cloud providers' own published ranges, and the verification files Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo and Ahrefs publish for their crawlers. | Its own measurement rather than published lists: the pages describe ProbeNet, "our proprietary internet measurement platform", reaching "44% of the world's ASNs within 1 millisecond" from "more than 1,000 points of presence". Privacy detection (VPN, Tor, proxy, relay) starts on the Core plan, with the service names added on Max; residential proxy detection is Max and above. |
| Refresh cadence | Every feed re-syncs daily, the botnet command-and-control list hourly, and the geofeed crawl weekly. Each response names every dataset it consulted with the date it was last synced, and /status lists them all. | "Data updates every 24 hours" |
| Geolocation source | The DB-IP Lite database, overridden wherever the operator publishes the location itself — an RFC 8805 geofeed, Apple's relay list, a VPN provider's server list. location_source says which answered, and location_confidence is graded from a weekly accuracy report rather than asserted. | Its own database: country level on Lite, city level from Core up, with a geolocation accuracy radius from Max up. The pages make no numeric accuracy claim and note that "rural accuracy is still inherently lower than urban areas". |
| Bulk limit | 100,000 addresses per bulk job, with an HMAC-signed completion webhook | not on the pages read |
| Batch API | 1,000 addresses per synchronous request; repeats inside the list are looked up once | not on the pages read |
| Rate limit | 50 requests per second per key on the IP endpoints | not on the pages read |
| Official SDKs | Python, Node.js, PHP | not on the pages read |
| Data retention | Nothing: no history row and no log line carrying the address, only a hashed 7-day marker that makes a repeat free. Bulk input lists and result files are deleted with the job after 30 days. | not on the pages read |

## When IPinfo fits better

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.

- The data is measured rather than aggregated: ProbeNet is IPinfo's own network of probes
- The free Lite plan puts no cap on API requests, but answers country only
- Abuse contact and company data are Enterprise-only
- Database downloads are sold, so the data can run inside your own infrastructure

## When Spaw fits better

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.

- IPinfo gates fields by plan — privacy detection from Core, carrier and residential proxy from Max, abuse contact and company from Enterprise; Spaw answers every field it has on every lookup for the same 1 credit
- IPinfo sells a monthly request quota; Spaw sells credits that never expire, and reserved, private and documentation ranges are free
- Spaw names each feed and its sync date in the response and grades location_confidence from a weekly accuracy report; IPinfo publishes no per-answer provenance
- IPinfo's data is proprietary; every dataset behind a Spaw IP answer is a public feed a customer can read for themselves

## Questions

**Does Spaw charge for addresses its feeds do not cover?** Spaw bills per answered address. Reserved, private, loopback, CGNAT, documentation and multicast ranges answer reason reserved_range and are free, and so is a repeat of the same address within seven days. A flag no feed could evaluate answers null rather than false: the address still costs 1 credit, and the null tells you the signal was not checked instead of pretending it was. IPinfo does not publish how it bills them.

**Can I run a log file or an export through Spaw?** Yes. A bulk run takes up to 100,000 addresses from the dashboard or the API and returns one row per input address, in input order, with every flag, the risk score and the signals that made it. Repeats inside the list are looked up once, reserved ranges cost nothing, and the finish is announced on an HMAC-signed webhook.

**Is there a free tier?** Every Spaw account receives 10 free credits at the start of each month with no card on file, and unused credits accumulate. IPinfo offers: IPinfo Lite at "$0/mo", free forever with no credit card, giving unlimited API requests at country level only.

## Sources (checked 2026-09-10)

- [IPinfo pricing](https://ipinfo.io/pricing)
- [IPinfo IP geolocation database](https://ipinfo.io/products/ip-geolocation-database)

IPinfo is a trademark of its owner. Spaw is not affiliated with it.

Reference: https://spaw.co/compare/ipinfo