IP Geolocation APIs Compared: What the Free Tier Really Gives You

You have an IP address. You want a city. The obvious move is to grab a free geolocation API key and call it a day. The bill arrives later, in a currency you did not price in: quota cliffs, stale databases, and the moment your "free" city lookup starts costing you real money.

I ran the same list of 1,271 IPs through the free tiers of the usual suspects. Here is what each route actually gives you before it starts charging.

The Five Routes

1. ipapi.co — 1,000 calls/day free. Zero setup, no key needed for the first tier.
2. ipinfo.io — 50 calls/day free. Fast, accurate, and the free tier is a demo, not a tool.
3. ip-api.com — 45 requests/minute free, no key. Self-host option for the whole database.
4. MaxMind GeoLite2 — free database file, license key required, updated weekly. Local lookups, unlimited.
5. BigDataCloud — free tier with 10,000 requests/day, no key, non-commercial clause.

What the Free Tiers Hide

The quota cliff is not a ramp. ipinfo's 50/day means any batch over fifty needs a card. ipapi's 1,000/day looks generous until you realize a single day of log enrichment for a mid-size site is 50,000 lookups. The cliff arrives at the exact moment your project stops being a toy.

ip-api's rate limit is the friendly one. 45/minute, no key, no card. For a solo builder enriching a CSV of a few thousand IPs, you just sleep 1.4 seconds between batches and never pay. The catch: free tier is non-commercial, and the cloud endpoint lags the paid one on database freshness.

MaxMind is the only free tier with no per-call ceiling — because it is not an API at all. You download the GeoLite2 file, load it locally, and every lookup is free and instant, forever. The real cost is the license-key registration dance (account required), the weekly update cycle (a location that moved yesterday is stale until you re-download), and the accuracy floor on mobile ISPs: a cell-tower IP will place you in the ISP's regional hub, not the user's street. No free tier fixes that; it is a property of the data, not the vendor.

BigDataCloud trades money for clauses. 10,000/day free is the most generous quota in the group, but the license is non-commercial. For a side project measuring where readers come from, fine. The moment the project earns a dollar, you are re-reading contracts.

The Decision Table

What I Would Not Do Again

Do not build your pipeline against the API shape of the free tier and assume you can scale into the paid one. The databases differ between free and paid at several vendors — same endpoint, different accuracy, and you will debug "why did the city change" for a week before you notice the vendor swapped the underlying file behind the same URL. Pin the database, version your expectations, cache aggressively: an IP-to-city map you already fetched is the only geolocation lookup that is both free and instant.

For OSINT-style work — enriching exported chat logs, server logs, forum scrapes — I settled on MaxMind local for bulk and ip-api for the trickle, and the whole stack costs nothing. The day you need city-level accuracy for ad targeting, none of these free tiers are your product anymore, and that is fine: they were never priced to be.

What free geolocation route has burned you with a cliff? I am curious which quota developers actually hit first.