> There's at least a handful of companies already operating in this space. Go google "ip geolocation api". Take a look through them and you'll see a common pattern.
> * They're bloody expensive. * They invoke artificially low limits on the number of requests you can make per month.
No, they're not all expensive, there's free ones too.
ip-api.com also has it for free when its non-commercial use, or €13-15/mo for unlimited commercial use, which is cheaper than yours, it has been around since 2012, serves over 33k/rps and seems to give more data and in several formats.
findip.net is unlimited for free.
freeipapi.com is €8.25-9.90/mo for unlimited, which is again cheaper than yours
As you can see from the above (perfectly reasonable) reply, positioning on price isn't the most effective means here because anyone using this for software that makes money cares primarily about your robustness and accuracy as a service.
By robustness I'm not just talking uptime, but more "If I give this person money today how to do I know they'll be around tomorrow, they could disappear and I'm burning time calling and testing a new API"
I think you're actually doing a good job on this by showing on the homepage that you've been running this for over a decade.
So in launching your new paid add on, I think you'll have some success getting existing customers to upgrade, but in attracting new customers, I think you should position different than cost, maybe things that other geolocation services might not have.
For instance.... some users of your service may be using it because it's less intrusive visually than the browser based location sharing API.... but there might be a subset of customers where they're trying to keep the balance of getting location vs usability right and would opt to use the browser based API as a fallback... perhaps you offering a confidence score along with results might help? (On your backend this could be based on searching multiple ip DBs in parallel, matching locations means higher confidence, or you could get fancy with triangulation latency).
> * They're bloody expensive. * They invoke artificially low limits on the number of requests you can make per month.
No, they're not all expensive, there's free ones too.
ip-api.com also has it for free when its non-commercial use, or €13-15/mo for unlimited commercial use, which is cheaper than yours, it has been around since 2012, serves over 33k/rps and seems to give more data and in several formats.
findip.net is unlimited for free.
freeipapi.com is €8.25-9.90/mo for unlimited, which is again cheaper than yours