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Ask HN: Is our pricing structure right?

2 points by kevinjyc ↗ HN
Our service: https://smartip.io is an IP Geolocation API and we are currently offering the following tiers:

Free Tier: up to 250,000 req/mo Startup Tier: up to 1.5 Million req/mo for $40/mo Pro Tier: up to 10 Million req/mo for $150/mo Enterprise Tier: need to contact us to discuss

Considering that this is a pretty cluttered market we are trying to be as much competitive as possible. What do you guys thing about the current pricing structure? Any suggestions?

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.1 ms ] thread
QUFB
It's a very cluttered market. Why are you different than any other geolocation service?

Honestly, it's really easy (and cheap) to do it yourself: Buy the Maxmind DB and leverage open source libraries for reading the data.

kevinjyc
Let me provide some key points:

1. We are different because most of all other services segment the data based on tiers. We return the entire dataset even for free users.

2. Our Free tier is huge compared to other services.

3. We are fast. Our response time is in the region of 50ms, which is really good for the amount to information we return. We don't cache our response, we always return fresh data.

About MaxMind, you are right about how easy would be to have an in-house solution. But a highly scalable, distributed infrastructure like ours guarantees the same response time from multiple locations across the world. Also, having the solution in-house would need updating and maintainig the database periodically as well.

big_chungus
The free maxminddb geolite2 does fine for most cases, too. Nice and easy-to-use python module to go with it. I'm pretty sure the city one is ~100MB, so doable to keep a copy on-device.
kevinjyc
I think it is all down to the usage and performance needed. If you need high resiliency and performances, using a third party API like smartip.io is the way to go.

If the requirements are less strict then using a local db like MaxMind would be the right choice.

As a side note, we offer very simple and well documented libraries in C#, Typescript and PHP.