Geolocation

[iambateman]

https://github.com/sapics/ip-location-db/tree/main/dbip-city/ https://www.ipify.org/

Connecting an IP to a location is nontrivial.

Maybe this is a "pro only" feature?

[tnylea]

https://www.maxmind.com/en/home, this is one that we use internally. It's actually a large database that you can store yourself and then look-up the location based on a range. I think you can periodically update the db that stores location<=>IpAddress info.

[iambateman]

Oh nice! I'll dig into that a bit more.

[tnylea]

I think you're right though, that maybe we have an API endpoint that users of the package can hit. Something like https://api.signalmetrics.com. They can sign up for a free account and get an API key. Maybe we limit users to ~100 or maybe even ~1,000 free requests a day and then they can upgrade to Pro to get unlimited requests. When it comes to server load, you and I may want to talk to Bobby about possibly joining because he's really good with Load balancers and server load/stress tests. You and I can discuss this later 😊

Anyway, we could possibly purchase a monthly membership with MaxMindDB and gain access to the DB file that contains Location<=>IpAddress info.

Looks like the price is pretty reasonable.

I'm not sure what we would want to charge users for a Pro account, but I do like the idea of only having a few pricing teirs or even a single pricing teir, like ($30/mo.) Especially if it's self hosted metrics on their end and they just use our API to gain additional metrics.

Here's one thing that I hated about UseFathom: I was getting ~200k uniques and some visitors would have 10+ pageviews. I was also using their event system. Eventally I was hitting a price teir that was over 1M data entries which was $100/mo 🤑

At that point I said to myself 👇

"This is ridiculous, I'm just switching back to GA, which is free"

So, if we could target those people that were in the same situationas myself I think we'll look attractive to many others.

[iambateman]

Great news!

MaxMind offers a creative commons DB download of their IP location database.

I built a connector to query that db (which is 60mb) and I'm thinking we could just ship that db with the package directly.

Then we'd just be on the hook for disclosing that we're using them ("thanks to MaxMind for location=>IP connection") and it's done.

I have more thoughts on business model but I'll pull that into a separate thread.

[iambateman]

for reference... https://www.maxmind.com/en/accounts/1063348/geoip/downloads is where the download is

https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2/eula is the license.