
Show HN: Identify company type by IP address - kevinjyc
https://smartip.io
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joshmn
What was the sales process like for the FBI? Apple? NASA?

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guessmyname
> _What was the sales process like for the FBI? Apple? NASA_

There was no sales process with any of the linked companies.

The logos are used simply as a marketing strategy to create hype.

~~~
joshmn
I was being more subtle.

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somada141
I know products like this are ubiquitous but I really like the response one
gets. Kudos on launching!

The pricing, however, is a little confusing. A seemingly very-generous free-
tier (though the "Up to 250,000 IP requests / mo" is a little confusing, what
dictates whether one gets the full quota?) and the next tier-up at 250$/m is a
bit too rich for my blood. Wouldn't it make more sense to have some in-between
tier where you charge per 1000s of requests or something? I fear the jump will
preclude people from going to the 'Pro' tier.

~~~
kevinjyc
Thanks a lot @somada141! Apologies for any confusion.

Let me clarify: the Free tier covers the first 250k API requests made in a
single month. If the number of requests in a month goes beyond the threshold,
the API will start returning Forbidden errors. The counter gets reset at the
first of each month.

If your service gets more than 250k hits a month, then you will be a perfect
match for our "Pro" tier.

This pricing structure, puts us on a league of our own, offering to the
developers a huge package of free API calls every single month. Nobody else
does it!

~~~
somada141
Hm a 403 when one runs out of credit can be misleading as one would expect
that for an authorization error. You may want to consider the `402 Payment
Required` status code instead which seems to be used by some big players [0].

Best of luck with your launch!

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#402](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#402)

~~~
kevinjyc
I confirm we updated the API to return a 402 error message when the user
reached the limit of the her pricing tier. Thanks again for this suggestion.

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benjojo12
Is this a clone of ipinfo.io?

~~~
joshmn
I mean, probably. But there's also ip-api.com, ipapi.co, ipstack.com,
ipgeolocation.io, ipinfodb.com, ipify.org... List goes on and on.

Most of these providers just package MaxMind data and send it back. Some of
them have more data that they inject themselves.

~~~
wakatime
We use ipstack.com, I'm curious which have the most accurate and complete
data?

~~~
kevinjyc
We offer additional datapoints which ipstack doesn't.

We expose high detailed ASN data which include company name, company type, ASN
network, web domain.

Also we expose a crypto datapoint, which flags if an IP is an active Bitcoin
node.

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kichik
Would have been cool if it gave the actual type of the company as a result.
Like if someone from Toys R Us visits your page, you could give them a retail
use case front and center. Is that planned?

~~~
kevinjyc
That's a very good point. We constantly try to improve the data accuracy of
our API. We currently support the following company types: "education", "isp",
"hosting", "government", "business". We also expose the domain assigned to the
ASN of the IP currently looked up, this would probably give you enough info to
implement the logic you are suggesting.

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polyterative
how is this in the front page?

~~~
oops
Good question. Only 3 points. User has 6 karma and is only 65 days old. And
there are other posts around the same time with more votes on /newest that
aren't on the front page.

At first I thought it may have been a second-chance resubmission by a
moderator[0], but it has a recent submission id so that's probably not it.

I guess one of the other two points came from someone with a lot of karma, or
there's not a lot of new posts right now?

0:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20206120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20206120)

Edit: And now it's gone entirely from / and /show, but is still on /shownew
...

