About
Last updated on October 13, 2024
Questions or comments about the project can be sent to the email address
info@ipapi.is
Do you have corrections to our IP data? Please submit them via the
Corrections
page.
Development on ipapi.is started as a research project in early
2021. Initially, the goal was to study and analyze how to accurately detect hosting provider IP
addresses
through open source intelligence gathering. As the research progressed, the project expanded to include more
data points
like company
, asn
, and location
information to build a comprehensive
IP intelligence database for academic purposes.
API
Usage
Number of paid API requests in the last 30 days:
62,000,000
Registered
Users
Number of registered users since January 2023:
1,200
Response
Time
Average API response time in millie seconds (ms):
1.2ms
Server
Locations
API servers in different locations:
Germany, US East, Singapore
ipapi.is was started as a research project and acted primarily as a home for
various
research ideas
related
to IP address data and IT security. When the API started to mature, more businesses started to
depend on it and ipapi.is is now a established player in the IP API field.
As of 2025, the
API can be considered as a serious contender to other IP API services such as ipdata.co or ipinfo.io, as a recent blog
post titled ipinfo.io Alternative
demonstrates.
ipapi.is preferably uses public data to populate the
database that is
used for the API. For instance, IP geolocation intelligence is obtained from
publicly downloadable WHOIS
records and reverse IP lookups. Another
major data source is
the awesome FireHol project, from which the API
flags is_proxy
(firehol_anonymous.netset)
and is_abuser
(firehol_abusers_1d.netset)
are sourced.
A goal of this
project was to prove that public data alone is sufficient to source a robust IP address API. A part of the
data is freely available for download on the ipapi.is GitHub page.
Another goal of the ipapi.is research project is to publish the
processes and mechanisms of obtaining the data used in the API.
However, publicly available data alone is not sufficient to create an extraordinary API for IT security meta
data.
Therefore, there is a strong focus on creating accurate proprietary databases as
the following examples illustrate:
- VPN Service Detection - The
is_vpn
and vpn
API flags are
sourced
by systematically enumerating VPN exit nodes from large
VPN providers such as NordVPN or ExpressVPN. Put differently, accurate data about VPN exit nodes is
obtained by systematically connecting to all available VPN regions for the most well known VPN providers.
- Hosting Detection Algorithm - A proprietary
algorithm to detect previously
unknown hosting/cloud IP ranges was developed. This makes ipapi.is the IP
API with the best hosting detection quality available.
- Network of HoneyPots - ipapi.is uses a vast network of
honeypots distributed throughout the entire Internet to source the
is_abuser
API
field.
- Large Crawling Pipeline - In order to keep the core data up to date and to
enrich existing datasets, ipapi.is needs constant scraping and
crawling. Millions of requests are fired from a distributed crawling architecture each week to
keep the data up to date. For example, to derive the
type
field of the
company
and asn
object, millions of company websites are crawled, and the
crawled
meta data is analyzed with AI technology. Currently, the ChatGPT API is used to classify the company
type based on the company's website meta data.
ipapi.is provides an extensive free plan, but a larger request volume (More
than 30k monthly requests) is only available with purchased credits.
Most similar projects either have a very limited free
plan or don't include
ASN and WHOIS information in their basic plan. With ipapi.is, you have
access to all API output
regardless of the subscription plan you choose. The only difference is in the request volume.
Up to 1,000 daily API requests are free.
If you have a larger API volume, please consider subscribing to a billing plan or making a one-time credit
purchase. Subscriptions are cancellable
at any point in time. One-time credits never expire, and you can use them at your own pace.
API Strengths
Ipapi.is has several strengths:
- IP Geolocation: By parsing WHOIS data and using open-source geolocation projects, an
accurate and frequently updated geolocation database is compiled.
- Accurate Hosting Detection: A complicated
hosting detection
algorithm uses public WHOIS data to detect thousands of hosting and cloud providers around the globe.
- VPN Exit Node Enumeration: We constantly enumerate
thousands of VPN Exit Nodes on a
daily basis. This makes us one of the best VPN Detection providers on
the market.
- WHOIS Data: WHOIS data is the primary data source for IP address data.
Since not all possible use cases for IP address data are known,
ipapi.is provides raw and updated WHOIS records for all active ASN's and
IP networks.
- IP to ASN: The API provides accurate and frequently updated ASN
information for all
autonomous systems. If the ASN is active (at least one route assigned to it), WHOIS
information is returned on top of it.
- IP to Organization: Each IP address is owned (or allocated) by a company or
organization. Knowing which organization is responsible for a certain IP range helps
classify traffic originating from it in a better way. Organization data is also sourced from WHOIS
records.
API Accuracy
There is a strong focus on data accuracy, but since the API consumes many third-party public IP address
projects, it is impossible to guarantee error-free API output in all cases. Even WHOIS data, which
otherwise is the most reliable data source for IP address data, may be erroneous at times.
In case an error is found in the data, please don't hesitate to contact ipapi.is via the email: info@ipapi.is.
Future Direction and Milestones
As of October 13, 2024
The data quality of ipapi.is is constantly improving. The following
projects are planned for the future or currently in process:
- Create a stable
v1
API output format - The data format of the API is still
experimental. In 2024, the v1
output format will be defined.
- Derive IP geolocation intelligence from IPv4 Reverse DNS data -
Basically, the task is to replicate most of the findings from Microsoft Research paper "IP Geolocation through Reverse DNS"
-
Forward DNS Lookup of all known Domains (Not yet started) - The Internet consists of
hundreds of millions
domains
from
hundreds of TLDs. For many reasons, it is interesting to know which IP address hosts which domain
name. Therefore, a complete forward DNS lookup of all known domain names is planned.
The following projects were already achieved and are completed:
- Systematically compare ipapi.is data quality with best competitors ipinfo.io, ipqualityscore.com, ipdata.co, ipapi.com (Completed in
October 2024) - The
best kind of advertisement is to prove that ipapi.is data quality is superior to the main competitors. The
API quality was compared to the main competitors by
using a transparent and fully public test case. The results were published in the following
blog articles:
An honest Comparison of
ipapi.is to its Competitors and
IP to Company Accuracy
.
- Improve the organization coverage (Completed in
June 2024) - The task is to improve the
organizational granularity of ipapi.is as it is seen in
the
company
output object.
- Reverse DNS Lookup of the entire IPv4 Address Space (Started in Nov 2023, completed in
Jan 2024) -
Reverse DNS lookups for IP
addresses
can help to enrich the IP geolocation
quality. Furthermore, reverse DNS data can be used to determine the
connection type of an IP address. For that reason, a continuous reverse DNS lookup of the entire IPv4
space
was conducted. The reverse DNS querying of 3.7 Billion (!) IPv4 addresses took roughly two months. The
data will be
used
internally for ipapi.is, but the Reverse DNS database will also be sold directly on ipapi.is