Sitelet https://ipapi.is/terms.html

Terms of Service

Last Update: 3rd October 2026

1. Scope, Provider and Customers

1.1 These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern every contract about the ipapi.is API, the Database Products, the self-hosting software and the website ipapi.is (together the "Service") between Nikolai Tschacher, trading as ipapi.is, Berlin, Germany (VAT ID DE325806975; full address in the imprint) ("ipapi.is", "we", "us") and its customers ("Customer", "you").

1.2 The most important points: our databases and API data are licensed, not sold, for your own internal use only. Passing them on, using them for a product or service offered to third parties, or obtaining them for a provider of IP data is prohibited and is subject to a contractual penalty, damages and injunctions (Sections 2.3 and 2.11 to 2.14). Database Product subscriptions are non-refundable (Section 2.10).

1.3 Our paid offers (one-time credits, API subscriptions, Database Products and the Business Subscription) are directed exclusively at entrepreneurs within the meaning of Section 14 of the German Civil Code (BGB), that is, persons and entities acting in the exercise of their trade, business or profession, and at legal entities under public law. By ordering a paid offer, you confirm that you order as such. Consumers (Section 13 BGB) may use the free tier if they are at least 18 years old.

1.4 Terms and conditions of the Customer do not apply, even if we do not object to them or perform without reservation. Individual agreements take precedence over these Terms, and our Data Processing Agreement takes precedence on the processing of personal data (Section 11).

1.5 The API can also be used without an API key, in the reduced form described on the free tier page. Such use, like the use of the website, is free of charge and permitted only on the conditions of Sections 2.3, 2.12 and 6. Section 8.4 applies to our liability.

2. API Data and Database Usage Terms

ipapi.is provides IP intelligence "Database Products" to its customers. These products are databases in CSV, MMDB, JSON or other documented file formats (such as .rdnsz), available by subscription and for download:

  • Business Subscription
  • IP to Hosting Database
  • IP to Geolocation Database
  • IP to ASN Database
  • IP to VPN Database
  • IP to Company Database
  • IP to Abuser Database
  • Reverse DNS Database

Additionally, ipapi.is offers "API Data Subscriptions", which let you query any IPv4 or IPv6 address via the ipapi.is API. For the purposes of these Terms, "API Data Subscriptions" covers every form of API access through a registered account: the free tier, one-time credit purchases, and paid subscriptions (see Section 2.9).

In summary, ipapi.is provides two classes of products:

  • "Database Products"
  • "API Data Subscriptions"

The free IP geolocation database offered on the geolocation page is not a Database Product. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 with the attribution described there, and this Section 2 does not apply to it.

2.1. Business Subscription and Self-Hosting Software

The Business Subscription is described on the Business Subscription page. It includes download access to all Database Products and to the self-hosting software: the ipapi.is API server as an executable program, together with its precompiled database.

For the term of the subscription, you may install and run the self-hosting software on systems under your control, solely for the permitted purposes in Section 2.2. It may serve only your own systems and applications and must not be made accessible to third parties (Section 2.3). You may not modify, decompile or otherwise reverse engineer it, except where Sections 69d and 69e of the German Copyright Act (UrhG) permit this. When the subscription ends, Sections 2.5 and 2.7 apply to the software as they apply to the data.

2.2. License Grant & Permitted Purposes

Upon registration of an account (including on the free tier), purchase of one-time credits, or subscription, ipapi.is grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable license, limited to the term of the respective contract, to access and use the Database Products and API Data Subscriptions solely for the internal purposes of the Customer, the single person or legal entity that concluded the contract. Any contractor or affiliate that accesses the data must do so exclusively on your behalf, under written confidentiality obligations at least as strict as these Terms, and must not retain or reuse the data for its own benefit.

You may use and process the data only to support internal decision-making, analytics, fraud prevention, security, personalization, and operational workflows directly tied to your products or services. Acceptable examples include:

  • Using API responses or database entries to score, block, or challenge potentially malicious clients in your applications or infrastructure.
  • Enriching log files or analytics systems to inform routing, localization, personalization, or abuse investigations, provided the enriched data is not re-distributed externally.
  • Displaying enriched IP intelligence to your employees or contractors inside internal dashboards that cannot be queried or exported by the general public.
  • Sharing limited excerpts for customer support or marketing communications so long as no recipient can enumerate the underlying dataset and each disclosure contains less than 1% of the full database or 10,000 records (whichever is smaller).
  • Caching API query results for up to 30 days solely for resiliency or performance reasons, after which the data must be refreshed or deleted.

Any derived metrics or scoring models must irreversibly transform the data so that a third party cannot reconstruct more than a negligible portion of the source database. Publicly displayed data must remain purely illustrative, aggregated, or sampled, and must never enable interactive querying of the underlying ipapi.is dataset. Unless we enter into a separate written agreement, a "negligible portion" means no more than 1% of a database or 10,000 records (whichever is smaller) in aggregate over a rolling 30-day period.

2.3. Restrictions and Prohibited Uses

You are strictly prohibited from the following uses of ipapi.is data and databases:

  • Reselling or Redistribution: You may not resell, sublicense, lease, rent, transfer, or distribute ipapi.is data to third parties in any medium, including by exposing identical or trivially modified copies (such as reformatting columns, renaming fields, or adding superficial metadata). Sharing more than a negligible portion of the database—defined as more than 1% or 10,000 records, whichever is smaller—in any rolling 30-day period is strictly prohibited.
  • Intermediary or White-Label Use: You may not use the data to operate an IP intelligence, threat-intelligence, geolocation, or similar service that competes with ipapi.is, nor may you make the data available through an API, downloadable feed, or subscription product for the benefit of third parties.
  • Public Sharing: You may not publish or disclose ipapi.is data in a manner that allows the general public or third parties to enumerate, export, scrape, or otherwise access more than a negligible portion of the dataset. Any public example or marketing material must be redacted and must not allow automated collection.
  • Data Manipulation: Modifying the data in a trivial manner to disguise its origin or to facilitate redistribution, resale, or matching against other databases for the benefit of third parties is prohibited.
  • External Access: You may not grant any third party (including affiliates, contractors, or service providers) persistent access to ipapi.is data unless they are bound by written agreements that (a) limit use to your direct benefit, (b) prohibit retention after services end, and (c) comply with these Terms. You remain responsible for any use by such parties.
  • Cloning, Reverse Engineering, or Derivative Products: Creating derivative databases, machine-learning models, or services that permit extraction or reconstruction of the original data, or training models for the purpose of competing with or replicating ipapi.is products, is prohibited.
  • Improving Other IP Data: You may not use ipapi.is data, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, to create, compile, correct, update, verify, validate, benchmark, enrich, seed or train any dataset, database, model, API or service that is made available to third parties and provides IP address information of any kind (including geolocation, ASN, company or organisation, hosting, VPN, proxy, Tor, abuse or reverse DNS data). This applies however the data is transformed, aggregated or combined with other sources, whether it is the only source or one signal among many, whether or not any record is reproduced verbatim, and notwithstanding the allowances for derived metrics, models and works in Sections 2.2 and 2.5.
  • Unauthorized Use: Using the data in violation of applicable law, regulatory requirements, sanctions regimes, or the rights of any third party is not allowed. Circumventing rate limits, security controls, or payment requirements is also prohibited.

The allowances for a negligible portion in Sections 2.2 and 2.3 are counted in aggregate across all recipients and disclosures, and never permit a use described under "Intermediary or White-Label Use" or "Improving Other IP Data". A service that answers third parties' questions about IP addresses with ipapi.is data breaches these Terms even if each answer contains only a single record.

2.4. Data Security

You must implement reasonable security measures to protect ipapi.is data from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Storing data in a secure manner that prevents unauthorized access or leaks.
  • Ensuring that only authorized personnel within your organization have access to the data.
  • Regularly reviewing and updating your security practices to align with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
  • Encrypting data at rest and in transit using industry-standard encryption methods.
  • Implementing access controls and authentication mechanisms to ensure only authorized use of the data.
  • Notifying ipapi.is at info@ipapi.is within 72 hours of becoming aware of any actual or suspected unauthorized access, breach, or misuse of the data.

2.5. Data Retention, Deletion, and Derivative Works

You may retain ipapi.is data only for the term of the contract under which you obtained it, and solely for the permitted purposes above. You must delete or overwrite superseded versions of the Database Products within 90 days of receiving an updated release. When the contract, or the subscription for a Database Product, ends, you must permanently delete all copies of the data within 30 days, including backups, caches, cached API responses and datasets that depend primarily on ipapi.is data, and certify the deletion in text form within ten (10) days of our request. Results that have become part of your own records of individual events, such as a log entry, a transaction or a fraud decision, may be kept for as long as you need those records, but must not be used as a source for further lookups. Statutory retention obligations remain unaffected. If ipapi.is asks you to preserve data, copies or records because it suspects a breach of these Terms, you must keep them unchanged and unused instead of deleting them, until ipapi.is releases you in text form.

Derived works, analytics models, or scoring systems that rely on ipapi.is data must meaningfully transform the data and may not allow downstream users to recover more than a negligible portion of the dataset. Any external report or visualization must combine ipapi.is data with other independent data sources or statistical techniques such that the original rows cannot be reverse engineered.

2.6. Compliance, Reporting, and Auditing

You agree to comply with all applicable laws and regulations regarding the use of ipapi.is data. If you license Database Products, you must keep records of who accessed them and on which systems they are held, in particular download, access and usage logs, for at least twelve (12) months.

Once in any twelve-month period, ipapi.is may ask you to confirm in text form, with reasonable detail, that your use of the data complies with these Terms. Where there are concrete indications of a breach of these Terms or of a security incident, ipapi.is or an independent auditor bound to professional secrecy may also audit your use of the data, remotely or on-site, upon reasonable prior notice, during normal business hours and in a manner designed to minimize disruption to your operations. You must provide access to the relevant records and systems and promptly correct any identified non-compliance at your own expense. ipapi.is bears its own audit costs, unless the audit reveals a material breach of these Terms, in which case you reimburse ipapi.is for the reasonable audit costs. Refusing to cooperate is a material breach of these Terms. Section 2.14 remains unaffected.

2.7. End of the License

When a contract ends, the license granted under it ends. You must then immediately cease all use of the data obtained under it, except for records kept under Section 2.5, stop API calls with the affected API keys and delete the data as set out in Section 2.5. Any use after that point is unlicensed and infringes the rights of ipapi.is under Section 2.12.

2.8. Data Quality and Corrections

IP address data is compiled from public registries, routing data, measurements, third-party sources and automated inference, including statistical and machine-learning methods. It is probabilistic by nature: address assignments change constantly, and individual records may be wrong, incomplete or out of date. The agreed quality of the data is that it is compiled with care, using the methods ipapi.is applies at the time; a particular accuracy, completeness or coverage is owed only if expressly agreed. Inaccurate individual records are therefore not a defect. ipapi.is updates the data regularly, at the intervals described on the product pages, and reviews errors reported through the corrections page and corrects them where justified.

You decide yourself whether and how to rely on the data. It is not designed to be the sole basis of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects for individuals (Art. 22 GDPR), and you are responsible for the lawfulness of your own use of it.

2.9. Free Tier and One-Time Credits

Every registered account includes a free tier of 1,000 API requests per day. The free tier requires an account and an API key. Requests made without an API key are served on a separate anonymous tier with a lower daily limit and a reduced response, as described at https://ipapi.is/free-tier.html.

The free tier returns the complete API response. It is not a trial, it is not limited in time, and it is not restricted to testing, development or non-commercial use. You may use the free tier for any purpose permitted by these Terms, expressly including commercial products and services, subject to the same license, permitted purposes and restrictions (Sections 2.2 to 2.8) that apply to paid plans. If the free tier is sufficient for your application, you are under no obligation to purchase credits or a subscription.

The free tier is granted once per person or legal entity. Creating or operating multiple accounts, or otherwise circumventing rate limits, in order to obtain more than one free daily quota is prohibited and may result in the termination of all accounts involved (Section 10.2). Where you build a product in which your own users access the ipapi.is API with their own ipapi.is accounts and API keys, each of those users is a separate Customer with their own free tier.

Beyond the free tier, API requests may be purchased as one-time credits at the rate shown in the dashboard at the time of purchase (30,000 requests per US dollar as of the last update of these Terms). One-time credits never expire, are not tied to a billing period and do not require a subscription. On each day, the free tier is consumed first and only requests beyond it are deducted from purchased credits; a paid subscription's daily quota is likewise consumed before purchased credits. Credits are bound to the account that purchased them and are non-transferable.

2.10. Database Product Billing, Minimum Term, and Refunds

Database Products — the IP to Hosting, IP to Geolocation, IP to ASN, IP to VPN, IP to Company, IP to Abuser and Reverse DNS databases, as well as the database download access included in the Business Subscription — are offered as recurring monthly subscriptions, not one-time purchases. Unless a different billing period is agreed in writing, the subscription renews automatically every month and is charged to your payment method until you cancel it.

Each Database Product subscription has a minimum term of one (1) month. When you subscribe you are charged for at least one full month. You may cancel at any time to stop further monthly renewals; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid month, and download access ends at that point.

Database Product subscriptions are non-refundable. Because the database is made available for immediate download the moment the subscription starts, you obtain a complete digital copy of the data at once. Once that copy has been delivered, ipapi.is has no technical means of verifying that every copy, backup, and derived dataset has been deleted and is no longer in use. For that reason all payments for Database Products are final: no full, partial, or pro-rated refunds are given — including for the minimum one-month term, for time remaining after cancellation, or where the data was downloaded only once. By subscribing to a Database Product you request its immediate delivery. Your statutory rights in the event of defects or non-performance, and Section 10.4, remain unaffected.

2.11. Who May License Database Products

Database Products are licensed only to end users that use the data for their own internal purposes under Section 2.2. Providers of IP address data products or services of any kind, whether as an API, database, feed or otherwise (including IP geolocation, ASN, company, hosting, VPN, proxy or threat-intelligence data) ("Competitors"), and anyone acting on their behalf or for their benefit, may not license or obtain Database Products without the prior written consent of ipapi.is.

You must license in your own name and for your own account, and the information you give about yourself must be true and complete. By ordering a Database Product you represent that you are not a Competitor and do not act on behalf of, or for the benefit of, a Competitor or any other third party. ipapi.is may ask for proof of identity and of the intended use before or after delivery, and may refuse an order. Download links, API keys and account credentials are personal to the licensee: you may not let a third party download or receive data through your account, credentials or systems, and you may not use a nominee, an intermediary or several accounts to obtain it. Data obtained in breach of this Section is not licensed. ipapi.is may then terminate the contract for good cause without notice (Section 10.2); fees paid in advance for the period after termination are set off against the claims of ipapi.is under Section 2.13.

2.12. Confidentiality and Protected Rights

The Database Products, and every substantial part of them, are confidential information and trade secrets of ipapi.is, made available only to licensees bound by these Terms. They are also protected as databases under Sections 87a et seq. of the German Copyright Act (UrhG) and Directive 96/9/EC, and by trade secret law, including the German Trade Secrets Act (GeschGehG). You must keep them confidential, protect them as set out in Section 2.4, and disclose them to no one except as these Terms expressly permit. These obligations survive the end of your subscription. Anyone who receives the data from you, or from anyone else, without a license from ipapi.is acquires no right to use it.

2.13. Contractual Penalty and Damages

For every culpable breach of Section 2.3, 2.11 or 2.12 by which ipapi.is data reaches a third party or is used for a product or service offered to third parties, you must pay ipapi.is a contractual penalty. ipapi.is determines its amount at its reasonable discretion (Section 315 of the German Civil Code, BGB), taking into account in particular the list price of the Database Products concerned, the number of recipients and users reached, the duration of the breach and the benefit obtained from it. In case of dispute, the competent court reviews the amount. The penalty is credited against any damages for the same breach. All further claims, in particular for damages, injunctive relief, information, removal and termination, remain unaffected. ipapi.is may calculate damages on the basis of a reasonable license fee, of the profit made through the breach, or of its actual loss.

2.14. Information, Cooperation and Injunctive Relief

If ipapi.is has reasonable grounds to suspect a breach of Section 2.3, 2.11 or 2.12, you must within ten (10) days give ipapi.is complete and truthful written information about whether and how data obtained through your account left your control, every person or entity that received, accessed or used it, the data concerned, the period, the purposes, and the systems on which it is held. You acknowledge that unauthorized disclosure or use of the data causes ipapi.is harm that cannot be adequately compensated by damages, and that ipapi.is may seek injunctive and other interim relief in any competent court, in addition to all other remedies.

3. Conclusion of Contract and Accounts

3.1 The presentation of our products on the website is not a binding offer. A contract for the free tier is concluded when you register an account and accept these Terms. A contract for a paid offer is concluded when you complete the order in the dashboard and we accept it, at the latest when we activate the product. We may refuse orders, in particular in the cases of Section 2.11.

3.2 Your registration details must be true and complete, and you must keep them up to date. If you register or accept these Terms on behalf of a company or other organization, you confirm that you are authorized to bind it; the organization is then the Customer.

3.3 Keep your password, API keys and download links secret. You are responsible for their use by third parties if you culpably made that use possible. If you suspect misuse, inform us at info@ipapi.is without delay; we may block and replace affected keys.

4. Prices, Payment and Term

4.1 The prices shown at the time of the order apply. Prices are in US dollars; value added tax is added where required by law. Payment is due in advance and is processed by Stripe or PayPal.

4.2 Subscriptions renew automatically for their billing period (monthly or annually) and are charged at the start of each period. You may cancel a subscription at any time in the dashboard or in text form (for example by email); the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. Database Products have a minimum term of one month (Section 2.10). We may terminate a subscription with 30 days' notice to the end of a billing period. The right of either party to terminate for good cause remains unaffected (Section 10.2).

4.3 We may change the prices of subscriptions for future billing periods. We will notify you of a price change in text form at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you may cancel the subscription until then. Price changes do not affect credits already purchased.

4.4 If a payment fails or is reversed, we may suspend paid features until it has been made; you bear the fees caused by a charge-back for which you are responsible. Fees for current billing periods, one-time credits and Database Products are not refunded, except under Section 10.4. Your statutory rights in the event of defects or non-performance remain unaffected.

5. Service Changes and Availability

5.1 We develop the Service continuously and may change it, including response fields, formats and endpoints, provided that the agreed core functionality of a paid product is preserved and the change is reasonable for you. We will announce changes that require you to adapt your integration in advance. We may change or discontinue free services (the free tier, the anonymous tier and the free geolocation database) for the future at any time.

5.2 For paid API plans, we owe an availability of the API of 99% on average per calendar month, measured at the internet connection of our servers. Not counted are maintenance announced in advance, attacks on our infrastructure (such as denial-of-service attacks) that could not be averted with reasonable protective measures, disruptions of networks and services we do not operate, force majeure, and suspensions under Section 10.1. No particular availability is owed for free services.

6. Acceptable Use

You must not:

  • interfere with, overload or attack the Service, or test its security without our prior consent in text form;
  • circumvent rate limits, quotas, access controls or bans, including by rotating IP addresses, API keys or accounts;
  • scrape the website or the API, or otherwise collect data from them by automated means beyond the quota of your account;
  • register with false information or impersonate another person or organization; or
  • use the Service for unlawful purposes or in breach of applicable sanctions or export control law.

7. Intellectual Property and Feedback

7.1 The Service, the website, the databases, the software and all other content of ipapi.is are protected by copyright, by the database maker's right (Sections 87a et seq. UrhG) and by trade secret law. You obtain only the rights expressly granted in these Terms; all other rights remain with ipapi.is.

7.2 If you send us feedback or suggestions, you grant us a free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide and non-exclusive right to use them for any purpose. We are not obliged to use them.

8. Liability

8.1 We are liable without limitation for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act (ProdHaftG), and where we have given a guarantee or fraudulently concealed a defect.

8.2 In the case of slight negligence, we are liable only for the breach of an essential contractual obligation, that is, an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you may regularly rely. Our liability is then limited to the damage that was foreseeable and typical for this type of contract when the contract was concluded. Otherwise, our liability for slight negligence is excluded.

8.3 In the cases of Section 8.2, our liability is further limited to the fees paid or payable by you for the affected product in the twelve (12) months before the event giving rise to the claim.

8.4 For services provided free of charge (the free tier, the anonymous tier, the free geolocation database and the website), we are liable only under Section 8.1.

8.5 Strict liability for defects that already existed when the contract was concluded (Section 536a (1), first alternative, BGB) is excluded. The limitations in this Section 8 also apply in favor of our employees, representatives and vicarious agents.

9. Indemnification

You indemnify ipapi.is against all claims that third parties, including authorities, assert against ipapi.is because of your use of the Service in breach of these Terms or of the law, to the extent you are responsible for the breach. This includes the reasonable costs of legal defense. ipapi.is will inform you of such claims without delay and give you the opportunity to comment before acknowledging or settling them.

10. Suspension and Termination

10.1 We may suspend your access to the Service in whole or in part, for example individual API keys or downloads, if (a) there are concrete indications that you are in breach of Section 2.3, 2.11, 2.12 or 6, (b) you are in default of payment, (c) your use endangers the security or stability of the Service, or (d) we are required to do so by law or by an authority. We choose the least restrictive effective measure, inform you unless this would defeat its purpose or endanger the preservation of evidence, and lift the suspension once its reason has ceased to exist.

10.2 Either party may terminate a contract for good cause without notice. Good cause for us exists in particular if you (a) culpably breach Section 2.3, 2.11 or 2.12, (b) fail to remedy any other material breach of these Terms within a reasonable period after a warning, (c) are in default with payments amounting to at least two monthly fees, or (d) obtained your account, the free tier or a purchase by false information or through multiple accounts.

10.3 When a contract ends, the license granted under it ends (Section 2.7). Provisions that by their nature are meant to apply after the end of a contract survive it, in particular Sections 2.3 to 2.7, 2.11 to 2.14, 7, 8, 9 and 13.

10.4 If we terminate a contract without good cause attributable to you, we refund fees paid in advance for the period after termination and the price paid for unused one-time credits.

11. Data Protection

11.1 We process the personal data of our customers (account, billing and support data) as controller, as described in our privacy policy.

11.2 Where you submit personal data to the API, such as the IP addresses of your users, we process it on your behalf as processor under Art. 28 GDPR. Our Data Processing Agreement forms part of these Terms and governs that processing. You are responsible for having a legal basis for submitting such data and for your own use of the results.

12. Changes to these Terms

12.1 We may amend these Terms with effect for the future if there is a valid reason, in particular changes in the law, in case law or in regulatory requirements, new products or features, or the need to close gaps or loopholes, and if the amendment is reasonable for you. Prices and the Service are changed only under Sections 4.3 and 5.1.

12.2 We will notify you of amendments by email at least 30 days before they take effect. You may accept them in the dashboard, and we may make further use of the dashboard and new purchases conditional on that acceptance. If you neither accept nor object before the amendments take effect, they are deemed accepted; we will point this out specifically in the notification. If you object, the previous Terms continue to apply, and either party may terminate the affected contract with effect from the date on which the amendments would have taken effect.

12.3 Amendments apply only for the future. Rights and claims that arose under an earlier version of these Terms, in particular from breaches of it, remain unaffected.

13. Governing Law, Jurisdiction and Final Provisions

13.1 These Terms and all contracts under them are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country of your habitual residence.

13.2 If you are a merchant (Kaufmann), a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, or an entrepreneur without a general place of jurisdiction in Germany, the courts of Berlin, Germany have exclusive jurisdiction for all disputes arising out of or in connection with these Terms, the Service or any contract under them, including disputes about their conclusion and validity and non-contractual claims. We may also bring proceedings at your general place of jurisdiction. Mandatory exclusive places of jurisdiction, and the right of either party to apply for interim relief before any court competent by law, remain unaffected.

13.3 The contract language is English. Should a provision of these Terms be invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions is not affected.

13.4 Questions about the Service or these Terms can be sent to info@ipapi.is.