Terms of service

Last updated 31 July 2026

What the service is

instantgeo answers one question: roughly where is the person making this request. You call the API with a key, and it returns an approximate location as JSON. It is not a lookup service for arbitrary addresses, and there is no endpoint that takes an IP as input.

Your account

You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your secret keys secret. Publishable keys are meant to be public: they sit in your page source, and the origin allowlist is what protects them. Secret keys are not, and anyone holding one can spend your quota.

You must be able to enter a contract in your jurisdiction. One person or organisation per account.

Plans, limits and billing

• Every self-serve plan includes a fixed number of requests per month and stops there.
• Past that limit the API returns 429 until the period resets. There is no overage and no usage charge, so your bill is the plan price and cannot exceed it.
• Paid plans are billed in advance through PayPal and renew until cancelled.
• Upgrades take effect immediately. Cancelling drops you to the free plan at the end of the paid period, and your keys keep working.
• Prices can change. We will email you before a change affects your renewal.

Redistribution

A normal plan covers use in your own sites and applications. If you ship software that other people install, such as a theme, plugin or app that calls the API with your key, you need a redistribution licence. That is a separate plan with an allowlist that does not apply and a limit that warns rather than stops, because cutting off a shared key breaks sites belonging to people who never chose this service.

If you are unsure whether your integration counts, ask us before shipping it.

Acceptable use

You may not:

• Resell or redistribute the API without a redistribution licence.
• Use it to identify, track or build a profile of an individual.
• Attempt to bypass the rate limits, the origin allowlist or a plan limit.
• Use it for anything unlawful, or in a way that puts the service at risk for others.

We may suspend an account that is doing one of these, or that is generating load which threatens the service for everyone else. Where we can, we will contact you first.

Accuracy

Location derived from an IP address is an estimate. It is accurate to a town at best, and it is worse on mobile networks, VPNs and corporate connections. Do not use it for anything where being wrong matters: fraud decisions, legal compliance, safety, or anything that denies someone access to something they are entitled to.

Availability

There is no service level agreement, and we do not offer one because we cannot yet back it. The service runs from a single region, so a caller far from it waits longer. We would rather say that here than have you discover it in production.

Your data

What we collect and how long we keep it is set out in the privacy policy. In short: your visitors' addresses are resolved in memory and dropped, never stored.

Liability

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Ending it

You can cancel at any time from the dashboard, and you keep access until the end of the period you paid for. We can end an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, and will refund any unused prepaid time unless the breach was deliberate.

Changes

We will email account holders before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means the new terms apply.

Contact

Get in touch or email [email protected].