Which changes can be reviewed?
A new country, unfamiliar ASN, hosting network, or rapid broad-region change can support review. Record the underlying event time and enrichment time. Avoid interpreting city distance as precise device movement.
How should policy respond?
Use step-up authentication, notification, or analyst review based on combined risk. Do not permanently block an account solely because network context changed. Track false positives and provide recovery paths.
What data controls are needed?
Restrict security-event access, define retention, redact keys, and document automated decision factors. Review policies for disproportionate impact and obtain appropriate security and legal guidance.
How should IP context influence a product decision?
Use the response to suggest a default, enrich an event, or add review context, then combine it with user confirmation or stronger evidence when the outcome matters. IP data describes a network attachment rather than an exact person or device. Travel, VPNs, carriers, corporate gateways, privacy relays, and cloud infrastructure can all change the apparent location or organization without indicating abuse.
What is the responsible fallback?
Continue with a neutral experience when lookup fails or optional fields are unavailable. Do not fabricate a city, coordinate, timezone, or network owner. Preserve explicit user settings over later network-derived suggestions, and route uncertain security cases to proportionate verification rather than automatic denial. Measure corrections and false positives so the workflow can be improved with real product evidence.
How should problems be diagnosed step by step?
Reduce the integration to one authenticated cURL request from trusted infrastructure, using GET /ip/8.8.8.8 as the known explicit fixture. Record the HTTP status, content type, elapsed time, and safely redacted body. If that succeeds, compare the application URL, headers, proxy behavior, timeout, and JSON model. If it fails, separate authentication, validation, capacity, transport, and server categories before changing code. Check GET /usage after 429, compare exact browser Origin values after CORS failure, and confirm the deployed environment received the intended secret. Do not rotate, retry, or increase limits blindly; preserve enough controlled evidence to identify the boundary that actually failed.
How should this behavior be tested?
Create unit fixtures for successful lookup or usage data, nullable optional fields, unknown additive properties, and every relevant error status. Mock timeouts and malformed intermediary responses so the client never mistakes an HTML proxy page for valid JSON. Run a small integration test with a designated nonproduction key and 8.8.8.8, inject the secret through CI, and keep live calls out of ordinary unit-test loops.
What privacy and accuracy boundaries apply?
IP intelligence is approximate network context. It does not prove identity, residence, billing country, precise device position, or individual ownership of a network organization. Retain only the source and derived fields required for the product purpose, restrict access, define deletion, and let users correct meaningful defaults. Security, financial, legal, or physical-location decisions require additional verified evidence and appropriate professional review.
Which plan and usage limits apply?
The 7-Day Developer Key provides 1,000 evaluation requests. Free includes 10,000 monthly requests and 1 active key. Starter includes 100,000 requests, 2 active keys, and up to 5 exact CORS origins per key. Pro includes 1,000,000 requests, 5 active keys, up to 10 origins per key, and a configurable 100 to 1,000,000 cap at key creation. Active keys share the account allowance.
| Plan | Monthly requests | Active keys |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 10,000 | 1 |
| Starter | 100,000 | 2 |
| Pro | 1,000,000 | 5 |
What should happen before release?
Confirm the endpoint and response model, validate URL construction, keep the secret outside source, set timeout and status-aware retry behavior, and test the real deployment environment. Add monitoring for latency, errors, shared usage, and per-key consumption. Document the owner, purpose, expected volume, fallback, retention, and rotation procedure. Review the implementation again whenever traffic, hosting origins, plan limits, or product decisions materially change.
External references
Continue with the standards and official documentation most relevant to this guide.