MaxMind popularised the downloadable GeoIP database, and for offline batch work that model still makes sense. It is a poor fit when you need a verdict at the moment a request arrives: databases go stale between refreshes, cloud providers reassign ranges weekly, and someone on your team ends up owning an update pipeline nobody wanted. Guarda takes the opposite approach — one HTTPS call, current data, geolocation and proxy detection in the same JSON object.
There is no binary database, no weekly refresh window and no version skew between your staging and production copies. Every call reads current data, so a range that was reassigned to a hosting provider yesterday is classified as hosting today.
Country, region, city, postal code, coordinates, timezone and currency arrive alongside the proxy, VPN, TOR, hosting, residential and cellular flags. You do not need to join a geolocation product with a separate fraud product to make a decision.
Every lookup returns a risk level plus the specific reasons behind it — TOR exit node, commercial VPN operator, datacenter ASN, known abuser — so you can justify a decline to a customer or a reviewer instead of quoting a number nobody can interrogate.
We do not write lookup results, queried addresses or per-request logs to any database. Billing runs on anonymous daily counters. That materially shortens the data-processing section of a vendor review.
Plans are priced on monthly query volume with the full field set included. There is no premium tier that unlocks the accuracy or the anonymiser flags you actually came for.
MaxMind has been at this for two decades and its enterprise footprint shows: local database distribution for air-gapped environments, a long-established minFraud scoring product with transaction-level features, and contractual arrangements that large procurement teams already recognise. If you need offline lookups with no outbound network call, or scoring that consumes card and order attributes rather than the connection alone, that is not what Guarda does. We are a live IP intelligence API, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Most GeoIP2 integrations consume a handful of fields — country, city, ASN, and sometimes the anonymous-IP flags. List them, and match each one to its Guarda equivalent in the API reference. The response is flat JSON with snake_case keys.
Call Guarda alongside your existing lookup and log both verdicts without changing any decision. A week of real traffic tells you exactly where the two disagree and whether those disagreements matter for your rules.
Re-tune your rules against the observed risk distribution — not against the old vendor's scale — then switch the decision path over and retire the database refresh job.
Run a sample of addresses through the bulk tool, compare the verdicts with what you get today, and only then decide.
