IPinfo.io: The most reliable source of IP address data

Please introduce yourself and your company

I’m Ben Dowling, founder and CEO of IPinfo. I’m originally from the UK and now live in Seattle with my wife and three kids. Prior to founding IPinfo, I was CTO at Calm.com, and prior to that, I was an engineer at Facebook where I worked on stopping bad ads and malicious advertisers.

IPinfo prides itself on being the most reliable, accurate, and in-depth source of IP address data available anywhere. Our IP address-related APIs serve over 20 billion API requests per month for more than 100,000 businesses and developers.

We’re a bootstrapped, remote company with a team based all around the world.

Why did you decide to bootstrap and create a remote-first company after working in companies that IPO’d or took large amounts of funding (Facebook, Calm)?

IPinfo evolved fairly organically, from a fun little side project, then into a more fully formed product, and eventually into a real business. By the time I started working fulltime on it and hiring people it was already profitable and growing, so there was no need to raise capital.

And as for making it a remote company, I really enjoy the flexibility and freedom of being able to work from anywhere at any time myself, so that also felt fairly natural. And I think it’s a huge advantage for us, being able to hire from anywhere in the world, and have a team of people that can work from wherever they feel most productive.

Tell us more about IP Info different APIs

IPinfo offers several different APIs that return IP address data, and we even have a batch API endpoint that allows users to make multiple API calls in bulk.

These are the APIs we currently provide:

• Geolocation: Returns a JSON response containing data fields describing the specified IP's region, country, city, postal code, coordinates, and more. The geolocation API returns a JSON response containing data fields describing the specified IP's region, country, city, postal code, coordinates, and more.
• ASN: Returns a JSON response containing the specified ASN's registered name, assigned prefixes, related domain, and more. Each prefix in the response is organized as an object containing its netblock, ID, name, and country.
• IP ranges: Returns a JSON response containing the specified domain’s IP ranges in CIDR format. This data will include the total number of ranges and an array with each of them.
• Hosted domains: Returns a JSON response containing the top 25 (sorted by Alexa rank) domains that are hosted on an IP. The response will also include the ASN, total number of domains, and IP range. Details can be also be looked up via domain or ASN, which can return an array of all associated IPs.

These APIs offer ways to resolve IP addresses to locations, mobile carriers, companies, domain names, and more. Our data sets are updated as frequently as daily, and we’re constantly refreshing and correcting our data to ensure it’s of the highest quality possible.

We also have support for eight official client libraries: Django, Java, Laravel, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. In the future, we’re hoping to grow that number even more.

Signing up for an account with IPinfo is completely free, and an API token isn’t even required to try out our service. Free accounts are limited to 1,000 requests per day, but we’re currently working on rolling out ways for free users to increase that limit. We also offer Basic ($49/month), Standard ($249/month), Pro ($999/month), and Enterprise plans that provide higher request limits (into the millions) and more features. Customers who pay for an annual subscription save by getting two months for free, and you can read more about each plan on our Pricing page.

How are companies using your API?

IPinfo’s APIs can be useful to every industry you can think of. We’re currently working on use case pages for many different industries to explain common ways that IPinfo can be implemented, and we’re also involved in several case studies with enterprise customers. Feel free to check out our completed case studies with Bupa, one of the largest international healthcare groups, and GreyNoise, one of the most unique cybersecurity startups.

Our APIs can be used for simple purposes, like redirecting users based on their location, or for more complex projects, such as creating your own in-house analytics dashboard using the data we serve. Here are some common use cases:

• Limiting login attempts
• Displaying weather-based content
• Promoting local events
• Blocking automated visits from hosting providers
• Gating sales based on location
• Identifying malicious user activity

IPinfo is a developer’s best friend in the sense that if you can think of a system that revolves around IP addresses and the data behind them, we can provide you with everything you need to bring it to life.

What are some APIs that your company uses, and how are they being used?

We use several APIs, but three that really stand out and have been great for our business are Stripe, Mailgun, and FullStory.

We use Stripe for payment processing, Mailgun for email sending and validation, and FullStory for analytics. We hope that we’re able to deliver a quality of service to our customers comparable to what these three have offered to us.

Anything else that you would like to add?

While IPinfo is primarily an API provider, we also sell our data in several downloadable formats. We have RWHOIS, RIR WHOIS, hosting and domain, and more data available. We can update this data as frequently as required and access is provided via a secure URL endpoint. For more information and a list of available fields, check out our Data Download page.

Lastly, we really appreciate hearing from our users. We’ve developed many features based on the feedback we’ve received from customers, and our sales team and support team would love to hear from anyone with questions, concerns, or advice on how we can improve our service.