Ipapi: A Simple, Scalable IP Lookup Tool
One of the tools powering great user experience is IP location data. This information can do everything from making forms easy for users to fill out, to ensuring that the correct language is used on a website to help prevent fraud online.
It’s a tool that more and more website developers are turning to. And if you want to get all of this functionality in a single solution, ipapi could be the tool for you. Here’s a look at what it is and how it works.
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What Is ipapi?
ipapi is an API cloud service allowing customers to automate IP address validation and geolocation lookup in websites, applications and back-office systems. The API is capable of determining up to 47 unique data points for each processed IP address, including location, connection, ISP, currency, time zone and security attached to a given IP address.
The product was created by apilayer, a software company based in the United Kingdom and Austria. apilayer is the company behind popular API and SaaS products worldwide, including the mailboxlayer and currencylayer APIs, invoicely and eversign.
The tool has been around since 2013 when it was created as part of an internal IP address validation and lookup tool for the company. Because it was so reliable and scalable, ipapi was further developed to meet the needs of all types of websites and businesses.
Who Should Use It?
ipapi is for any website that uses data to provide better user experiences. The tool allows you to accurately geolocate users by IPv4 or IPv6 addresses and is consistent and quick.
Here are a few ways that you can use ipapi:
- To personalize content. Group users by location so that they get content just for them with specialized marketing campaigns served automatically.
- Ensure that users get the right version of a multi-language website
- Automatically detect currency type so that online shoppers aren’t intimidated by money conversions
- Better display information, calendars and forms by detecting a user’s time zone
- Block actions from threatening IP addresses and prevent fraud before it happens, making your website more secure
How It Works
What’s great about ipapi is that it is an API-based tool. Most users can deploy the sleek JSON and XML API design and get running in under 10 minutes.
There’s plenty of extensive documentation to help you get all the code in place and customize your IP address data needs. Ipapi has been collecting data for a long time and has a solid relationship with service providers to ensure that IP data is accurate so users will get exactly the experience they expect.
According to ipapi:
IP address data comes with the highest level of accuracy and consistency currently on the market. The API is capable of returning precise and valuable information related to more than 2 million unique locations around the world and is updated multiple times during the day.
Thanks to a cloud-based infrastructure, the tool is scalable for websites of any size.
Key Features
One of the best things about ipapi is the number of data points from which you can integrate the API and help users. The API includes 45 options and every single one is returned in a lightweight JSON or XML format in milliseconds.
They include:
- Continent
- Country
- Region
- City
- ZIP Code
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Geoname ID
- Capital
- Languages
- Country Flag
- Calling Code
- EU Member Detection
- Time Zone ID
- Time Zone Code
- Current Time
- GMT Offset
- Daylight Saving Detection
- Currency Code
- Currency Name
- Currency Name Plural
- Currency Symbol International
- Currency Symbol Native
- ASN
- ISP
- Proxy Detection
- Crawler Detection
- TOR Detection
- Threat Evaluation
Scrolling through that list probably jump starts your creativity, helping you see the possibilities of how automatically populated data can help provide better user experiences. Forget drop down menus where users have to select the language for the website or type of payment or making a click to call function more functional.
Plus, the security features alone can be valuable for enterprise-level websites that have dealt with threats in the past.
Want to see how it looks in the programming language you prefer? Browse the documentation or check it out on GitHub.
Pricing
There’s a scalable plan for almost anyone that wants to use ipapi as a business solution, from small to large. Pricing levels start with a free plan and expand to meet user needs.
- Free: Up to 10,000 lookups per month using location data
- Standard ($10 per month): Up to 50,000 lookups per month using location, currency, time zone or connection data and HTTPS encryption
- Business ($50 per month): Up to 500,000 lookups per month using location, currency, time zone or connection data and HTTPS encryption with bulk lookups
- Business Pro ($100 per month): Up to 2,000,000 lookups per month using location, currency, time zone, connection or security data and HTTPS encryption with bulk lookups
- Custom packages are also available for high-volume requests
Annual billing discounts are also available.
Conclusion
There are plenty of brands you probably know using ipapi as a IP data solution, including Obey, Allianz, UberFlip and Wix.com. Start with a free plan; it’s worth a try to see if this is something that can enhance your website with personalization features for users and security features.
More than 30,000 businesses and websites around the world as using this real-time geolocation and reverse IP looking REST API. Try it today.
Our thanks to ipapi for sponsoring this post, and helping to support Design Shack.