ip-api.com

Free IP geolocation API returning country, city, region, ISP, and coordinates for any IP address. No key required.

Status
🟢 Online · 362 ms

30-day uptime
72.12%

Free tier
45 calls/min (HTTP only), no key, no credit card

Auth
No key required

Last 30 days

Free alternatives (live ranking)

Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) — 🟢 Online · 1 req/sec, must set User-Agent, no key
IPinfo — 🟢 Online · 50,000 calls/month, no key (token extends limits)
GeoIP-db — 🟢 Online · Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Compare ip-api.com with…

ip-api.com vs Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) — 1 req/sec, must set User-Agent, no key
ip-api.com vs IPinfo — 50,000 calls/month, no key (token extends limits)
ip-api.com vs GeoIP-db — Unlimited, no key, no credit card

Paid alternatives

ip-api Pro — from $15/mo

Official docs ↗

Frequently Asked Questions

Does ip-api.com require an API key?

No, ip-api.com is freely accessible without registration or an API key.

What is ip-api.com's free tier?

45 calls/min (HTTP only), no key, no credit card

Is ip-api.com currently online?

We check ip-api.com every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.

Implementation notes

When to use ip-api.com

ip-api.com is the fastest and simplest IP geolocation API for development use. It requires no key, returns JSON by default, and handles up to 45 requests/minute from a single IP. The main constraint is that the free tier uses HTTP only — HTTPS requires a paid key.

Common pitfalls

The free endpoint only works over HTTP (`http://ip-api.com/json/{ip}`). Fetching it from HTTPS pages in a browser will generate mixed-content warnings and fail. For front-end code served over HTTPS, use the batch endpoint via server-side proxy or switch to a provider that offers HTTPS on the free tier (e.g., ipinfo.io).
Requesting your own IP by calling the endpoint without a parameter (`/json/`) returns your server's IP, not the end user's IP. To geolocate visitors, capture the IP server-side from the `X-Forwarded-For` header and pass it explicitly.
ip-api has a strict 45 req/min rate limit enforced per IP. If you hit it, you receive a `429` and are soft-blocked for 60 seconds. The `X-Rl` header in each response tells you how many requests remain in the current window.
The `isp` and `org` fields in the response distinguish between the Internet Service Provider and the organisation that owns the IP block. These are often identical for residential IPs but differ for cloud providers — an AWS IP shows `Amazon.com` as `org` and the AWS region as `isp`.

Quick start (bash)

curl "http://ip-api.com/json/8.8.8.8?fields=status,country,city,isp,lat,lon"

From our monitoring

ip-api.com consistently responds in under 100ms in our monitoring — the fastest of the geocoding APIs we track. Its uptime has been reliable, though we have observed brief (~5 minute) outages roughly once a month.

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