Detection is not an add-on
Proxy, VPN, TOR, public proxy, web proxy, hosting, residential, cellular and search-bot flags ship with every lookup on every plan. There is no privacy-detection tier to buy on top of geolocation.
An IPinfo alternative with detection built in
IPinfo is a clean, well-documented geolocation and ASN API, and if location and network ownership are all you need it does the job. The friction usually starts when the question changes from where is this address to should I trust this connection — at which point privacy detection, hosting classification and abuse signals become separate products with separate plans. Guarda answers both questions in the same response, on the same plan.
Who should consider switching
- Teams already resolving geolocation and ASN who now need proxy, VPN and TOR verdicts.
- Anyone stitching together a geolocation API and a separate threat feed for one decision.
- Fraud and trust teams who need a risk score they can explain rather than raw attributes.
- Products that want hosting versus residential classification as a first-class field.
- Buyers who prefer one predictable monthly plan over several add-on subscriptions.
Where Guarda works differently from IPinfo
A scored verdict, not just attributes
Raw booleans still leave you writing the policy. Guarda returns a risk score, a level and the reasons behind it, so a threshold in your code maps onto something you can explain to a customer or an auditor.
Second-opinion verification
When the primary feed reports an address as completely clean, we run a secondary check that can escalate the verdict but never clear one. It catches false negatives on freshly-provisioned infrastructure that a single source tends to miss.
Nothing retained
Queried addresses and results are never persisted on our side. Billing runs on anonymous daily counters, which keeps end-user IP addresses out of a third party's storage entirely.
Free tools around the API
Bulk lookup, IP extraction from text, WHOIS for addresses and domains, CIDR maths and user-agent parsing are all available without an account, so evaluating the data does not require an integration first.
Data you get on every lookup
Country, region and city
Postal code and state code
Latitude, longitude and timezone
Currency of the located country
ASN and organisation name
ISP, domain and reverse hostname
Connection type and cellular flag
Proxy, VPN, TOR and web proxy detection
Hosting versus residential classification
Risk score, level and reasons
Being straight with you
IPinfo runs its own measurement infrastructure, publishes downloadable datasets and data-warehouse integrations, and offers a generous free tier for simple geolocation. If your requirement is bulk enrichment inside a data warehouse, or nothing more than country and ASN at very high volume, they are a strong and inexpensive fit. Guarda is aimed at the real-time trust decision rather than at analytics enrichment.
How a migration usually goes
1.Point the enrichment call at Guarda
The response is flat JSON with snake_case keys, so the change is usually confined to the function that already performs your lookup and the field names it reads.
2.Start consuming the detection fields
Add the proxy, hosting and risk fields to whatever record you already store, but do not enforce on them yet. A week of observation shows you the actual shape of your traffic.
3.Introduce policy where it pays
Apply the score at the single step where abuse costs you most — signup, checkout or login — and expand from there once the false-positive rate is known.
Try it against your own traffic
Run a sample of addresses through the bulk tool, compare the verdicts with what you get today, and only then decide.